Bibliographic Citation
| 7,420,225 | |
| Direct detector for terahertz radiation | |
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| 09/02/2008 | |
| US patent application 11/290,090 | |
| Wanke, Michael C. (Albuquerque, NM); Lee, Mark (Albuquerque, NM); Shaner, Eric A. (Albuquerque, NM); Allen, S. James (Santa Barbara, CA) | |
| Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM | |
| United States Department of Energy | |
| AC04-94AL85000 | |
| Sandia Corporation (Albuquerque, NM) | |
| A direct detector for terahertz radiation comprises a grating-gated field-effect transistor with one or more quantum wells that provide a two-dimensional electron gas in the channel region. The grating gate can be a split-grating gate having at least one finger that can be individually biased. Biasing an individual finger of the split-grating gate to near pinch-off greatly increases the detector's resonant response magnitude over prior QW FET detectors while maintaining frequency selectivity. The split-grating-gated QW FET shows a tunable resonant plasmon response to FIR radiation that makes possible an electrically sweepable spectrometer-on-a-chip with no moving mechanical optical parts. Further, the narrow spectral response and signal-to-noise are adequate for use of the split-grating-gated QW FET in a passive, multispectral terahertz imaging system. The detector can be operated in a photoconductive or a photovoltaic mode. Other embodiments include uniform front and back gates to independently vary the carrier densities in the channel region, a thinned substrate to increase bolometric responsivity, and a resistive shunt to connect the fingers of the grating gate in parallel and provide a uniform gate-channel voltage along the length of the channel to increase the responsivity and improve the spectral resolution. | |
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