A novel type of avalanche photodetector with Geiger mode operation, known as Silicon Photomultiplier (SiPM) is presented. Development of photodetectors for the detection of low intensity photon flux is one of the critical issues for experimental physics, medical tomography and many others. The structure of the photodetector is based on metal–resistor semiconductor (MRS) microcells with a densit...

The major radiation of the sun can be roughly divided into three regions: ultraviolet, visible, and infrared light. Detection in these three regions is important to human beings. The metal-insulator-semiconductor photodetector, with a simpler process than the pn-junction photodetector and a lower dark current than the MSM photodetector, has been developed for light detection in these three regi...

A silicon metal–semiconductor–metal photodetector with high-efficiency and high-speed in the infrared is reported. The high performance is achieved by using a Si-on-insulator substrate with a patterned nanometer-scale scattering reflector buried underneath a 170-nm-thick Si active layer. This scattering reflector causes light to be trapped inside the thin Si active layer, resulting in a fast an...

Light polarization is used in the animal kingdom for communication, navigation, and enhanced scene interpretation and also plays an important role in astronomy, remote sensing, and military applications. To date, there have been few photodetector materials demonstrated to have direct polarization sensitivity, as is usually the case in nature. Here, we report the realization of a carbon-based br...

Coherent Laser Radar Receiver (CLRR) typically employs high-quality bulk optics to collect and direct light at the photodetector plane. Collection of the back-scattered light from an optically-diffused target requires a large aperture area but it is limited by the atmospheric coherence length. Combining the local laser oscillator (LO) and the received optical signal at the photodetector require...

Light detection is the underlying principle of many optoelectronic systems. For decades, semiconductors such as silicon carbide, silicon, indium gallium arsenide and germanium have dominated the photodetector industry. They can exhibit excellent photosensitivity but are limited by one or more aspect, for example high production cost, high temperature processing, flexible substrate incompatibili...

A new optical front-end compensation technique to suppress the unwanted, spurious signal in photoreflectance (PR) spectroscopy is developed. In this approach an optical compensation signal, which is amplitude-matched to and in antiphase to the spurious signal, is introduced and directed to the photodetector. The combination of the compensation signal and the spurious signal results in a dc outp...

We demonstrate a new class of semiconductor device: the optically triggered infrared photodetector (OTIP). This photodetector is based on a new physical principle that allows the detection of infrared light to be switched ON and OFF by means of an external light. Our experimental device, fabricated using InAs/AlGaAs quantum-dot technology, demonstrates normal incidence infrared detection in the...

Optomechanical systems have enabled wide-band optical frequency conversion and multichannel all-optical radio frequency amplification. Realization of an on-chip silicon communication platform is limited by photodetectors needed to convert optical information to electrical signals for further signal processing. In this paper we present a coupled silicon microresonator, which converts near-IR opt...

There is an increasing interest in using graphene (1, 2) for optoelectronic applications. (3-19) However, because graphene is an inherently weak optical absorber (only ≈2.3% absorption), novel concepts need to be developed to increase the absorption and take full advantage of its unique optical properties. We demonstrate that by monolithically integrating graphene with a Fabry-Pérot microcavi...