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Sensitive mid-infrared detection in wide-bandgap semiconductors using extreme non-degenerate two-photon absorption

Nature Photonics volume 5, pages 561–565 (2011)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 03 December 2021

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Abstract

Identifying strong and fast nonlinearities for today's photonic applications is an ongoing effort1. Materials2,3,4,5 and devices6,7,8,9 are typically sought to achieve increasing nonlinear interactions. We report large enhancement of two-photon absorption through intrinsic resonances using extremely non-degenerate photon pairs. We experimentally demonstrate two-photon absorption enhancements by factors of 100–1,000 over degenerate two-photon absorption in direct-bandgap semiconductors. This enables gated detection of sub-bandgap and sub-100 pJ mid-infrared radiation using large-bandgap detectors at room temperature. Detection characteristics are comparable in performance to liquid-nitrogen-cooled HgCdTe (MCT) detectors. The temporal resolution of this gated detection by two-photon absorption is determined by the gating pulse duration.

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Figure 1: Mid-IR detection using a UV photodiode.
Figure 2: Extreme ND-2PA in semiconductors.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the US Army Research Office (grant no. 50372-CH-MUR) and the DARPA ZOE program (grant no. W31R4Q-09-1-0012).

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Author notes

  1. Dmitry A. Fishman, Claudiu M. Cirloganu & Lazaro A. Padilha

    Present address: Present address: COPE, Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332, USA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, PO Box 1663, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA (L.A.P.),

  2. Dmitry A. Fishman and Claudiu M. Cirloganu: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CREOL, the College of Optics & Photonics, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Blvd, Orlando, 32816-2700, Florida, USA

    Dmitry A. Fishman, Claudiu M. Cirloganu, Scott Webster, Lazaro A. Padilha, Morgan Monroe, David J. Hagan & Eric W. Van Stryland

  2. Department of Physics, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Boulevard, Orlando, 32816, Florida, USA

    David J. Hagan & Eric W. Van Stryland

Authors
  1. Dmitry A. Fishman
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Contributions

D.A.F., C.M.C., L.A.P. and S.W. conceived and performed the experiments. C.M.C and D.A.F. modelled the data and performed the theoretical analysis. M.M. designed and implemented the detection system. D.J.H. and E.W.V.S. suggested the basic concept of enhanced ND-2PA for experiments and applications. All authors contributed to the discussion of the results and writing the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eric W. Van Stryland.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Fishman, D., Cirloganu, C., Webster, S. et al. Sensitive mid-infrared detection in wide-bandgap semiconductors using extreme non-degenerate two-photon absorption. Nature Photon 5, 561–565 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2011.168

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