Photodetection in silicon beyond the band edge with surface states

Abstract

Silicon is an extremely attractive material platform for integrated optics at telecommunications wavelengths, particularly for integration with CMOS circuits. Developing detectors and electrically pumped lasers at telecom wavelengths are the two main technological hurdles before silicon can become a comprehensive platform for integrated optics. We report on the generation of free carriers in unimplanted SOI ridge waveguides, which we attribute to surface state absorption. By electrically contacting the waveguides, a photodetector with a responsivity of 36 mA/W and quantum efficiency of 2.8% is demonstrated. The photoconductive effect is shown to have minimal falloff at speeds of up to 60 Mhz.

Cited by in corpus (7)

• 422 Million Q Planar Integrated All-Waveguide Resonator with a 3.4 Billion Absorption Limited Q and Sub-MHz Linewidth
• Silicon Nanophotonic Waveguides for the Mid-Infrared
• All-optical mode unscrambling on a silicon photonic chip
• Self-aligning universal beam coupler
• Photoconductive Heaters Enable Control of Large-Scale Silicon Photonic Ring Resonator Circuits
• Optical bistability in a one-dimensional photonic crystal resonator using a reverse-biased pn-junction
• Multi-scale photonic emissivity engineering for relativistic lightsail thermal regulation