Cao Linyou, White Justin S, Park Joon-Shik, Schuller Jon A, Clemens Bruce M, Brongersma Mark L
Geballe Laboratory of Advanced Materials, Stanford University, California 94305, USA.
Nat Mater. 2009 Aug;8(8):643-7. doi: 10.1038/nmat2477. Epub 2009 Jul 5.
The use of quantum and photon confinement has enabled a true revolution in the development of high-performance semiconductor materials and devices. Harnessing these powerful physical effects relies on an ability to design and fashion structures at length scales comparable to the wavelength of electrons (approximately 1 nm) or photons (approximately 1 microm). Unfortunately, many practical optoelectronic devices exhibit intermediate sizes where resonant enhancement effects seem to be insignificant. Here, we show that leaky-mode resonances, which can gently confine light within subwavelength, high-refractive-index semiconductor nanostructures, are ideally suited to enhance and spectrally engineer light absorption in this important size regime. This is illustrated with a series of individual germanium nanowire photodetectors. This notion, together with the ever-increasing control over nanostructure synthesis opens up tremendous opportunities for the realization of a wide range of high-performance, nanowire-based optoelectronic devices, including solar cells, photodetectors, optical modulators and light sources.
量子和光子限制的应用在高性能半导体材料和器件的发展中引发了一场真正的革命。利用这些强大的物理效应依赖于在与电子波长（约1纳米）或光子波长（约1微米）相当的长度尺度上设计和塑造结构的能力。不幸的是，许多实际的光电器件呈现出中等尺寸，在这些尺寸下共振增强效应似乎并不显著。在这里，我们表明，泄漏模式共振能够将光轻柔地限制在亚波长、高折射率的半导体纳米结构内，非常适合在这一重要尺寸范围内增强和对光吸收进行光谱工程设计。这通过一系列单个锗纳米线光电探测器得到了说明。这一概念，连同对纳米结构合成日益增强的控制能力，为实现包括太阳能电池、光电探测器、光调制器和光源在内的各种基于纳米线的高性能光电器件开辟了巨大的机会。
