Improving the operation temperature of semiconductor-based terahertz photodetectors: A multiphoton design

Abstract

We propose and theoretically investigate a semiconductor-based terahertz-detector design exploiting a multiphoton absorption strategy through a bound-to-bound-to-continuum scheme. Our results demonstrate that such a multisubband architecture may access values of the background-limited infrared photodetection temperature, significantly higher than those of conventional quantum well infrared photodetectors operating at the same frequency, and therefore could represent a better alternative to the latter in the terahertz spectral region.