Semiconductor membranes emerged as a versatile class of nanomaterials to control lattice strain and engineer complex heterostructures enabling a variety of innovative applications. With this perspective, herein this platform is exploited to tune simultaneously the lattice parameter and bandgap energy in group IV GeSn semiconductor alloys. As Sn content is increased to reach a direct bandgap, these semiconductors become metastable and typically compressively strained. It is shown that the relaxation in released membranes extends the absorption wavelength range deeper in the mid-infrared. Fully released Ge 0.83 Sn 0.17 membranes are integrated on silicon and used in the fabrication of broadband photodetectors operating at room temperature with a record wavelength cutoff of 4.6 µm, without compromising the performance at shorter wavelengths down to 2.3 µm. These membrane devices are characterized by two orders of magnitude reduction in dark current as compared to as-grown strained epitaxial layers. A variety of experimental tools and optimized calculations are used to discuss the crystalline quality, composition uniformity, lattice strain, and the electronic band structure of the investigated materials and devices. The ability to engineer all-group IV transferable mid-infrared photodetectors lays the groundwork to implement scalable and flexible sensing and imaging technologies exploiting these integrative, silicon-compatible strained-relaxed GeSn membranes.

Design and fabrication of monolithically integrated III-nitride visible light-emitting-diodes (LEDs) and ultraviolet Schottky barrier-photodetectors (SB-PDs) have been proposed and demonstrated. Responsivity up to 0.2  AW(-1) at 365 nm for GaN SB-PDs has been achieved. It is shown that those UV SB-PDs were capable of sensitive UV light detection down to 7.16×10(-4)  W/cm2 at 365 nm, whereas simultaneous operation of on-chip blue LEDs has produced negligible crosstalk at practical illumination brightness. Monolithically integrated LEDs and SB-PDs can function as transmitters to emit visible light signals, and as receivers to analyze incoming UV signals, respectively; this offers the potential of using such devices for bi-directional optical wireless communication applications.

The availability of high-frequency pulsed emitters in the 2–2.5 μm wavelength range paved the way for a wealth of new applications in ultrafast spectroscopy, free-space and fiber-optical communications, surveillance and recognition, artificial intelligence, and medical imaging. However, developing these emerging technologies and their large-scale use depend on the availability of high-speed, low-noise, and cost-effective photodetectors. With this perspective, here we demonstrate GeSn photodiodes grown on silicon wafers featuring a high broadband operation covering the extended-SWIR range with a peak responsivity of 0.3 A/W at room temperature. These GeSn devices exhibit a high bandwidth reaching 7.5 GHz at 5 V bias with a 2.6 μm cutoff wavelength, and their integration in ultrafast time-resolved spectroscopy applications is demonstrated. In addition to enabling time-resolved electroluminescence at 2.3 μm, the high-speed operation of GeSn detectors was also exploited in the diagnostics of ultrashort pulses of a supercontinuum laser with a temporal resolution in the picosecond range at 2.5 μm. Establishing these capabilities highlights the potential of manufacturable GeSn photodiodes for silicon-integrated high-speed extended-SWIR applications.

The solution-processed PbSe colloidal quantum-dot (CQD) infrared photodetector with tandem architecture is proposed to address the high dark current issue. The electrical transport mechanism in tandem has been fundamentally changed in which the recombination of carriers at an intermediate layer becomes dominant rather than carriers hopping between nearest neighbors in CQD materials. As a result, the tandem photodetector exhibits ultra-high detectivities of 4.7 × 10(13) Jones and 8.1 × 10(13) Jones under 34 μW cm(-2) illumination at 1100 nm, at 275 K and 100 K, respectively.

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