Abstract
The use of quantum and photon confinement has enabled a true revolution in the development of high-performance semiconductor materials and devices1,2,3. Harnessing these powerful physical effects relies on an ability to design and fashion structures at length scales comparable to the wavelength of electrons (∼1 nm) or photons (∼1 μm). Unfortunately, many practical optoelectronic devices exhibit intermediate sizes4,5 where resonant enhancement effects seem to be insignificant. Here, we show that leaky-mode resonances, which can gently confine light within subwavelength, high-refractive-index semiconductor nanostructures, are ideally suited to enhance and spectrally engineer light absorption in this important size regime. This is illustrated with a series of individual germanium nanowire photodetectors. This notion, together with the ever-increasing control over nanostructure synthesis opens up tremendous opportunities for the realization of a wide range of high-performance, nanowire-based optoelectronic devices, including solar cells6,7,8, photodetectors9,10,11,12,13, optical modulators14 and light sources 14,15.
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Acknowledgements
We thank M. Preiner, S. Fan, F. Wang and Y. Cui for useful discussion during different stages of this project. This work was sponsored by the Si-based Laser Initiative of the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) under the Air Force Aerospace Research OSR Award Number FA9550-06-1-0470 and supervised by LTC Gernot Pomrenke. L.C. acknowledges the 2008 SPIE scholarship in Optical Science and Engineering. J.-S.P. acknowledges financial support from the System IC 2010 program of the Ministry of Knowledge Economy in the Republic of Korea.
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L.C. and M.L.B conceived the experiments. L.C. and J.-S.P. fabricated the nanostructures. L.C. and J.S.W. carried out the optical experiments. L.C., J.S.W., J.A.S. and M.L.B. analysed the data. All authors were involved in writing the manuscript.
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Cao, L., White, J., Park, JS. et al. Engineering light absorption in semiconductor nanowire devices. Nature Mater 8, 643–647 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2477
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2477
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