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Resonant thermoelectric nanophotonics

Nature Nanotechnology volume 12, pages 770–775 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

Photodetectors are typically based either on photocurrent generation from electron–hole pairs in semiconductor structures or on bolometry for wavelengths that are below bandgap absorption. In both cases, resonant plasmonic and nanophotonic structures have been successfully used to enhance performance. Here, we show subwavelength thermoelectric nanostructures designed for resonant spectrally selective absorption, which creates large localized temperature gradients even with unfocused, spatially uniform illumination to generate a thermoelectric voltage. We show that such structures are tunable and are capable of wavelength-specific detection, with an input power responsivity of up to 38 V W–1, referenced to incident illumination, and bandwidth of nearly 3 kHz. This is obtained by combining resonant absorption and thermoelectric junctions within a single suspended membrane nanostructure, yielding a bandgap-independent photodetection mechanism. We report results for both bismuth telluride/antimony telluride and chromel/alumel structures as examples of a potentially broader class of resonant nanophotonic thermoelectric materials for optoelectronic applications such as non-bandgap-limited hyperspectral and broadband photodetectors.

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Figure 1: Guided mode resonance and thermal design.
Figure 2: Thermoelectric material performance in guided mode resonance structure design.
Figure 3: Hyperspectral absorption tunability of guided mode resonance structures: theory and experiment.
Figure 4: Spectral, angle and time-dependent structure performance.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported primarily by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science grant DE-FG02-07ER46405. S.K. acknowledges support by a Samsung Scholarship. The authors thank M. Jones for discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Thomas J. Watson Laboratory of Applied Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 91125, California, USA

    Kelly W. Mauser, Seyoon Kim, Dagny Fleischman, Ragip Pala, K. C. Schwab & Harry A. Atwater

  2. Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 91125, California, USA

    Slobodan Mitrovic

  3. Kavli Nanoscience Institute, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 91125, California, USA

    Harry A. Atwater

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  1. Kelly W. Mauser
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  6. K. C. Schwab
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Contributions

K.W.M. and H.A.A. conceived the ideas. K.W.M. and S.K. performed the simulations. K.W.M. fabricated the samples. K.W.M. built the measurement set-ups specific to this study. K.W.M., S.M. and D.F. performed measurements, and K.W.M., S.K. and S.M. performed data analysis. K.S. contributed to the design and analysis of noise measurements. R.P. built a general-use measurement set-up and provided assistance with part of one supplementary measurement. K.W.M., H.A.A. and S.M. co-wrote the paper. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript, and H.A.A. supervised the project.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Harry A. Atwater.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Mauser, K., Kim, S., Mitrovic, S. et al. Resonant thermoelectric nanophotonics. Nature Nanotech 12, 770–775 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2017.87

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