Extraordinary Photocurrent Harvesting at Type-II HeterojunctionInterfaces: Toward High Detectivity Carbon Nanotube Infrared Detectors

Abstract

Despite the potentials and the efforts put in the development of uncooled carbon nanotube infrared detectors during the past two decades, their figure-of-merit detectivity remains orders of magnitude lower than that of conventional semiconductor counterparts due to the lack of efficient exciton dissociation schemes. In this paper, we report an extraordinary photocurrent harvesting configuration at a semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotube (s-SWCNT)/polymer type-II heterojunction interface, which provides highly efficient exciton dissociation through the intrinsic energy offset by designing the s-SWCNT/polymer interface band alignment. This results in significantly enhanced near-infrared detectivity of 2.3 x 10(exp 8) cm. sq root of Hz/W, comparable to that of the many conventional uncooled infrared detectors. With further optimization, the s-SWCNT/polymer nanohybrid uncooled infrared detectors could be highly competitive for practical applications.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 06, 2012
Accession Number
ADA612013

Entities

People

  • Alec Kirkeminde
  • Caleb Christianson
  • Judy Z. Wu
  • Rongtao Lu
  • Shenqiang Ren

Organizations

  • University of Kansas

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Absorption
  • Carbon Nanotubes
  • Charge Carriers
  • Composite Materials
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Electrons
  • Energy Bands
  • Films
  • Fullerenes
  • Infrared Detectors
  • Materials Science
  • Measurement
  • Polymer Matrix Composites
  • Quantum Efficiency
  • Self Assembly
  • Semiconductors

Readers

  • Nanocomposite Materials Science
  • Quantum Dot Semiconductor Device Photonics and Graphene Optoelectronic Materials and THz Physics.
  • Semiconductor Device Technology

Technology Areas

  • Microelectronics