The theory of hot-electron photoemission in Schottky-barrier IR detectors

Low-loss, infrared and terahertz nanophotonics using surface phonon polaritons

“…The rich physics associated with surface plasmons and their potential for manipulating light at the nanoscale initiated the fields of nanophotonics [5] and metamaterials [6]. Plasmonics research has led to many advancements such as improved chemical detection [7][8][9][10] and enhanced quantum efficiency for detectors in the ultraviolet (UV), visible (vis) and near-infrared (NIR) spectral ranges [11][12][13][14][15][16]. However, while significant effort has been directed toward plasmonics, its promise for many applications has not been realized due to the high optical losses inherent in metals at optical frequencies [17][18][19].…”

Study on the long wavelength SiGe/Si heterojunction internal photoemission infrared photodetectors

“…We should, however, note that the result of Fowler analysis is not unique because of too many adjustable parameters involved in the calculations such as L p , hx, and L e . Even though there are no certain values available for these parameters, the ones used here are within the ranges suggested by Mooney and Silverman [8] for Schottky IR technology (L p % 50-150 Å , L e % 500-5000 Å and hx % 1-10 meV). Strong et al [3] used similar values for L e and L p for their SiGe/Si detectors; they extracted the elastic scattering length L p of 10 Å from the relaxation time measurements in heavily doped material.…”

“…When the contributions of the phonon collisions and hence energy losses to the yield have been taken into account, the total internal yield is then viewed as a sum of partial yields. Then it can be written as [8,19]. where the effects of holes which have been emitted on previous distribution are appeared in terms like (1 À Y n /Y 1 ).…”

“…The operation mechanism of the SiGe/Si heterojunction infrared photodetector is the same as that of the PtSi/Si Schottky barrier detector, which is the most popular and studied Schottky barrier detector [8,9]. To obtain 1350 device parameters for the best performance, we need to have a clear physical understanding of the device operation: internal photoemission is the process in which a carrier is created/excited by an incoming photon, transported to another region and detected as an electric signal.…”

Quantum mechanical effects in internal photoemission THz detectors

“…(1) by Vickers [7] and Dalal [8], independently. The assumption made in their work, i.e., energy lost due to hot carrier and phonon collisions, was taken in to consideration by Mooney and Silverman in improving the model [9] later. In a previous study, the internal photoemission efficiency for SiGe/Si HIP detectors was obtained using different effective masses for the strained SiGe doped absorber/emitter layer and the Si-substrate [10,11].…”