Light coupling mechanism of quantum grid infrared photodetectors

Rigorous electromagnetic modeling based on a modal solution of the pertinent boundary-value problem was performed to study the light coupling mechanism in quantum grid infrared photodetectors with lamellar patterns. Our theory shows that vertical field component and absorption quantum efficiency η can be strongly enhanced by judiciously adjusting the width w of individual grid lines. This enhancement is further increased if the top of the grid lines is covered by metal, which behave as a collection of dipole scatterers. We have experimentally verified the dipole scattering characteristics with different w, and found that the variation of η agrees very well with the theory. We also found that, as expected, the conductivity of the metal strips affects η significantly due to internal dissipation.