Nanocrystals appear as versatile building blocks for the design of low-cost optoelectronic devices. The design of infrared sensors based on nanocrystals is currently facing a key limitation: the short carrier diffusion length resulting from hopping transport makes that only a limited part of the incident light is absorbed. In order to enhance the device absorption, we use Guided Mode Resonance (GMR). The method appears to be quite versatile and is applied to both PbS and HgTe nanocrystals presenting respectively cutoff wavelengths at 1.7 and 2.6 µm. The designed electrodes present a large enhancement of the material responsivity around a factor of ≈250, reaching external quantum efficiency of 86% for PbS and 340% for HgTe. This increase of the response can be deconvoluted in a factor of 3 for the enhancement of the absorption and a factor of 80 for the photocurrent gain. The method can also be suited to finely tune the cutoff wavelength of the material thanks to geometrical parameters at the device level. The obtained devices are now only limited by the material noise.
The ultra-strong light-matter coupling regime has been demonstrated in a novel threedimensional inductor-capacitor (LC) circuit resonator, embedding a semiconductor twodimensional electron gas in the capacitive part. The fundamental resonance of the LC circuit interacts with the intersubband plasmon excitation of the electron gas at ω c = 3.3 THz with a normalized coupling strength 2Ω R /ω c = 0.27. Light matter interaction is driven by the quasi-static electric field in the capacitors, and takes place in a highly subwavelength effective volume V eff = 10 −6 λ 3 0 . This enables the observation of the ultra-strong light-matter coupling with 2.4 × 10 3 electrons only. Notably, our fabrication protocol can be applied to the integration of a semiconductor region into arbitrary nano-engineered three dimensional meta-atoms. This circuit architecture can be considered the building block of metamaterials for ultra-low dark current detectors. Metamaterials were introduced to enable new electromagnetic properties of matter which are not naturally found in nature. Celebrated examples of such achievements are, for instance, negative refraction 1 and artificial magnetism. 2 The unit cells of metamaterials are artificially designed meta-atoms that have dimensions ideally much smaller than the wavelength of interest λ 0 . 3 Such meta-atoms act as high frequency inductor-capacitor (LC) resonators which sustain a resonance close to λ 0 ∝ √ LC. 3 The resonant behaviour, occurring into highly subwavelength volumes, generates high electromagnetic field intensities which, as pointed out by the seminal paper of Pendry et al., 2 are crucial to implement artificial electromagnetic properties of a macroscopic ensemble of meta-atoms. Moreover, the ability to control and enhance the electromagnetic field at the nanoscale is beneficial for optoelectronic devices, such as nano-lasers 4 electromagnetic sensors 5-7 and detectors. 8-12 For instance, metamaterial architectures have lead to a substantial decrease of the thermally excited dark current in quantum infrared detectors, resulting in higher temperature operation. 11,12The LC circuit can be seen as a quantum har-
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