skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: All-epitaxial resonant cavity enhanced long-wave infrared detectors for focal plane arrays
We demonstrate a monolithic all-epitaxial resonant-cavity architecture for long-wave infrared photodetectors with substrate-side illumination. An nBn detector with an ultra-thin (t≈350 nm) absorber layer is integrated into a leaky resonant cavity, formed using semi-transparent highly doped (n++) epitaxial layers, and aligned to the anti-node of the cavity's standing wave. The devices are characterized electrically and optically and demonstrate an external quantum efficiency of ∼25% at T=180 K in an architecture compatible with focal plane array configurations.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1926187
PAR ID:
10440299
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
American Institute of Physics
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Applied Physics Letters
Volume:
122
Issue:
2
ISSN:
0003-6951
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. In this work, evidence for acoustoelectric (AE) amplification in lateral-extensional thin-film piezoelectric-on- silicon (TPoS) resonant cavities for the first time is demonstrated. Due to the piezoelectric coupling, an evanescent electromagnetic wave is induced in the silicon (Si) layer that is a part of the resonant cavity, exchanging momentum with the carriers. Therefore, by injecting an electric current in this layer, the acoustic equivalent of Cherenkov radiation – AE amplification – can be realized. Such phenomenon is observed in a 1 GHz TPoS resonant cavity in which lateral field excitation is utilized to excite the acoustic wave. 
    more » « less
  2. We demonstrate a method to obtain homogeneous atom-cavity coupling by selecting and keeping 87Rb atoms that are near maximally coupled to the cavity's standing-wave mode. We select atoms by imposing an AC Stark shift on the ground state hyperfine microwave transition frequency with light injected into the cavity. We then induce a spin flip with microwaves that are resonant for atoms that are near maximally coupled to the cavity mode of interest, after which, we use radiation pressure forces to remove from the cavity all the atoms in the initial spin state. Achieving greater homogeneity in the atom-cavity coupling will potentially enhance entanglement generation, intracavity driving of atomic transitions, cavity-optomechanics, and quantum simulations. This approach can easily be extended to other atomic species with microwave or optical transitions. 
    more » « less
  3. We propose an on-chip triply resonant electro-optic modulator architecture for RF-to-optical signal conversion and provide a detailed theoretical analysis of the optimal “circuit-level” device geometries and their performance limits. The designs maximize the RF-optical conversion efficiency through simultaneous resonant enhancement of the RF drive signal, a continuous-wave (CW) optical pump, and the generated optical sideband. The optical pump and sideband are resonantly enhanced in respective supermodes of a two-coupled-cavity optical resonator system, while the RF signal can be enhanced in addition by an LC circuit formed by capacitances of the optical resonator active regions and (integrated) matching inductors. We show that such designs can offer 15-50 dB improvement in conversion efficiency over conventional microring modulators. In the proposed configurations, the photon lifetime (resonance linewidth) limits the instantaneous RF bandwidth of the electro-optic response but does not limit its central RF frequency. The latter is set by the coupling strength between the two coupled cavities and is not subject to the photon lifetime constraint inherent to conventional singly resonant microring modulators. This feature enables efficient operation at high RF carrier frequencies without a reduction in efficiency commonly associated with the photon lifetime limit and accounts for 10-30 dB of the total improvement. Two optical configurations of the modulator are proposed: a “basic” configuration with equal Q-factors in both supermodes, most suitable for narrowband RF signals, and a “generalized” configuration with independently tailored supermode Q-factors that supports a wider instantaneous bandwidth. A second significant 5-20 dB gain in modulation efficiency is expected from RF drive signal enhancement by integrated LC resonant matching, leading to the total expected improvement of 15-50 dB. Previously studied triply-resonant modulators, with coupled longitudinal (across the free spectral range (FSR)) modes, have large resonant mode volume for typical RF frequencies, which limits the interaction between the optical and RF fields. In contrast, the proposed modulators support maximally tightly confined resonant modes, with strong coupling between the mode fields, which increases and maintains high device efficiency across a range of RF frequencies. The proposed modulator architecture is compact, efficient, capable of modulation at high RF carrier frequencies and can be applied to any cavity design or modulation mechanism. It is also well suited to moderate Q, including silicon, implementations, and may be enabling for future CMOS RF-electronic-photonic systems on chip. 
    more » « less
  4. Electro-optic (EO) transduction of weak radio frequency (RF) and millimeter-wave signals, such as those received by an antenna, onto laser sidebands for processing in the optical domain requires efficient EO modulators. Microrings offer spatial density and efficiency advantages over Mach–Zehnder modulators (MZMs), but conventional single-ring modulators suffer a fundamental trade-off between resonantly enhanced conversion efficiency and the RF carrier frequency that it can accommodate. Dual-cavity “photonic molecule” modulators resolve this trade-off, allowing high efficiency independent of the RF carrier frequency by providing separate resonant supermodes to enhance the laser local oscillator (LO) and the narrowband RF-detuned sideband. However, the RF frequency is fixed at design time by geometry, with efficiency dropping quickly for RF carriers away from the design value. We propose a novel, to the best of our knowledge, triple-cavity configuration with an off-resonant middle ring acting as an effective tunable coupler between two active modulator cavities. This configuration provides wideband tunability of the target RF carrier while maintaining efficient sideband conversion. When the middle ring is passive (highQ), this configuration provides wide RF tunability with no efficiency penalty over the fixed dual-cavity case and could become an important building block for future RF/mm-wave photonic integrated circuits (PICs). 
    more » « less
  5. Abstract Hybrid light–matter coupled states, or polaritons, in magnetic materials have attracted significant attention due to their potential for enabling novel applications in spintronics and quantum information processing. However, most magnon‐polariton studies in the strong coupling regime to date have been carried out for ferromagnetic materials with magnon excitations at gigahertz frequencies. Here, strong resonant photon–magnon coupling at frequencies above 1 terahertz is investigated for the first time in a prototypical room‐temperature antiferromagnetic insulator, NiO,  inside a Fabry–Pérot cavity. The cavity is formed by the crystal itself with a thickness adjusted to an optimal value. Terahertz time‐domain spectroscopy measurements in magnetic fields up to 25 T reveal the evolution of the magnon frequency through Fabry–Pérot cavity modes with photon–magnon anticrossing behavior, demonstrating clear vacuum Rabi splittings exceeding the polariton linewidths. These results show that NiO is a promising platform for exploring antiferromagnetic spintronics and cavity magnonics in the terahertz frequency range. 
    more » « less