Metamaterial Based THz-IR Detectors

Technology

The invention is a device which contains a substrate made of a dielectric material or a semiconductor material and one or more resonator structures are disposed on the substrate. Each resonant structure consists of at least two spaced conductive structures. A local electric field enhancement in the substrate is exploited to produce a photo-induced conductivity response. This photo-induced conductivity response can be correlated to the power of the incident electromagnetic radiation and it can also be used to quantify properties of the electromagnetic radiation (including magnitude, spatial profile, polarization, etc.).

Problem Addressed

Current terahertz sensing technologies are relatively insensitive, or have very limited bandwidth. In the field of terahertz or gigahertz imaging, poor sensors limit technological adoption of terahertz radiation in a variety of applications that can span industries including security and quality control. Current technologies result in time-consuming scans to measure spectral and spatial information, and they also use relatively expensive detectors. The invention will help overcome these obstacles to wide technological adoption of terahertz radiation techniques by offering a route to sensitive, low-cost, and room-temperature sensing of radiation in the gigahertz to terahertz frequency band.

Advantages

• Room temperature operation. Many sensitive detectors for this frequency band need to be cooled to cryogenic temperatures. This invention may operate at room temperature, or temperatures reachable with thermoelectric cooling.
• Fast response times. This invention creates a conductivity response similar to semiconductor photodiodes operating at near-visible frequency bands. As a result, response times can be orders of magnitude faster than thermal detectors such as microbolometers, pyroelectric detectors, and Golay cells.
• Low cost. This invention may leverage standard semiconductor microfabrication techniques which promise low-cost volume manufacture.