RESUMEN
Surface states generally degrade semiconductor device performance by raising the charge injection barrier height, introducing localized trap states, inducing surface leakage current, and altering the electric potential. We show that the giant built-in electric field created by the surface states can be harnessed to enable passive wavelength conversion without utilizing any nonlinear optical phenomena. Photo-excited surface plasmons are coupled to the surface states to generate an electron gas, which is routed to a nanoantenna array through the giant electric field created by the surface states. The induced current on the nanoantennas, which contains mixing product of different optical frequency components, generates radiation at the beat frequencies of the incident photons. We utilize the functionalities of plasmon-coupled surface states to demonstrate passive wavelength conversion of nanojoule optical pulses at a 1550 nm center wavelength to terahertz regime with efficiencies that exceed nonlinear optical methods by 4-orders of magnitude.
RESUMEN
Superlattice structures of In(Al)GaAs with localized ErAs trap centers feature excellent material properties for terahertz (THz) generation and detection. The carrier lifetime of these materials as emitter and receiver has been measured as 1.76 ps and 0.39 ps, respectively. Packaged photoconductors driven by a 1550 nm, 90 fs commercial Toptica "TeraFlash pro" system feature a 4.5 THz single shot bandwidth with more than 60 dB dynamic range. The emitted THz power of the ErAs:In(Al)GaAs emitter versus laser power has been recorded with a pyroelectric detector calibrated by the Physikalisch Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB). The maximum power was 164 µW at a laser power of 42 mW and a bias of 200 V.