Plasmonically Enhanced Amorphous Silicon Photodetector With Internal Gain

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Photodetectors made of amorphous materials enable low-cost optical imaging and communications over non-semiconductor platforms. The key challenges are to improve efficiency, sensitivity, and frequency response. Using the localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) effect and an efficient carrier multiplication process, cycling excitation process (CEP), the plasmonically enhanced amorphous silicon photodetector (PEASP) with a thin (60 nm) absorption layer achieves a high external quantum efficiency with a record fast impulse response of 170 ps (FWHM). This approach offers the possibility of making detectors out of amorphous material for high frame rate imaging and optical communications in spite of the material's low carrier mobility.