TY - JOUR AU - Tang, Liang AU - Kocabas, Sukru Ekin AU - Latif, Salman AU - Okyay, Ali K. AU - Ly-Gagnon, Dany-Sebastien AU - Saraswat, Krishna C. AU - Miller, David A. B. PY - 2008 DA - 2008// TI - Nanometre-scale germanium photodetector enhanced by a near-infrared dipole antenna JO - Nature Photonics SP - 226 EP - 229 VL - 2 KW - optical antennas AB - A critical challenge for the convergence of optics and electronics is that the micrometre scale of optics is significantly larger than the nanometre scale of modern electronic devices. In the conversion from photons to electrons by photodetectors, this size incompatibility often leads to substantial penalties in power dissipation, area, latency and noise. A photodetector can be made smaller by using a subwavelength active region; however, this can result in very low responsivity because of the diffraction limit of the light. Here we exploit the idea of a half-wave Hertz dipole antenna (length approx 380 nm) from radio waves, but at near-infrared wavelengths (length approx 1.3 microm), to concentrate radiation into a nanometre-scale germanium photodetector. This gives a polarization contrast of a factor of 20 in the resulting photocurrent in the subwavelength germanium element, which has an active volume of 0.00072 microm3, a size that is two orders of magnitude smaller than previously demonstrated detectors at such wavelengths. N1 - exported from refbase (https://db.rplab.ru/refbase/show.php?record=858), last updated on Tue, 11 Sep 2012 12:47:29 -0500 ID - Tang_etal2008 ER -