A review on III-V compound semiconductor short wave infrared avalanche photodiodes

The on-chip avalanche photodiodes (APDs) are crucial component of a fully integrated photonics system. Specifically, III-V compound APD has become one of the main applications of optical fiber communication reception due to adaptable bandgap and low noise characteristics. The advancement of structural design and material choice has emerged as a means to improve the performance of APDs. Therefore, it is inevitable to review the evolution and recent developments on III-V compound APDs to understand the current progress in this field. To begin with, the basic working principle of APDs are presented. Next, the structure development of APDs is briefly reviewed, and the subsequent progression of III-V compound APDs (InGaAs APDs, Al_xIn_1-xAs_ySb_1-yAPDs) is introduced. Finally, we also discuss the key issues and prospects of Al_xIn_1-xAs_ySb_1-ydigital alloy avalanche APDs that need to be addressed for the future development of ≥2μm optical communication field.

Electroluminescence from HgTe Nanocrystals and Its Use for Active Imaging

Mercury telluride (HgTe) nanocrystals are among the most versatile infrared (IR) materials with the absorption of lowest energy optical absorption which can be tuned from the visible to the terahertz range. Therefore, they have been extensively considered as near IR emitters and as absorbers for low-cost IR detectors. However, the electroluminescence of HgTe remains poorly investigated despite its ability to go toward longer wavelengths compared to traditional lead sulfide (PbS). Here, we demonstrate a light-emitting diode (LED) based on an indium tin oxide (ITO)/zinc oxide (ZnO)/ZnO-HgTe/PbS/gold-stacked structure, where the emitting layer consists of a ZnO/HgTe bulk heterojunction which drives the charge balance in the system. This LED has low turn-on voltage, long lifetime, and high brightness. Finally, we conduct short wavelength infrared (SWIR) active imaging, where illumination is obtained from a HgTe NC-based LED, and demonstrate moisture detection.

HgTe Nanocrystals for SWIR Detection and Their Integration up to the Focal Plane Array

Infrared applications remain too often a niche market due to their prohibitive cost. Nanocrystals offer an interesting alternative to reach cost disruption especially in the short-wave infrared (SWIR, λ < 1.7 μm) where material maturity is now high. Two families of materials are candidate for SWIR photoconduction: lead and mercury chalcogenides. Lead sulfide typically benefits from all the development made for a wider band gap such as the one made for solar cells, while HgTe takes advantage of the development relative to mid-wave infrared detectors. Here, we make a fair comparison of the two material detection properties in the SWIR and discuss the material stability. At such wavelengths, studies have been mostly focused on PbS rather than on HgTe, therefore we focus in the last part of the discussion on the effect of surface chemistry on the electronic spectrum of HgTe nanocrystals. We unveil that tuning the capping ligands is a viable strategy to adjust the material from the p-type to ambipolar. Finally, HgTe nanocrystals are integrated into multipixel devices to quantize spatial homogeneity and onto read-out circuits to obtain a fast and sensitive infrared laser beam profile.

Preflight Spectral Calibration of Airborne Shortwave Infrared Hyperspectral Imager with Water Vapor Absorption Characteristics

Due to the strong absorption of water vapor at wavelengths of 1350–1420 nm and 1820–1940 nm, under normal atmospheric conditions, the actual digital number (DN) response curve of a hyperspectral imager deviates from the Gaussian shape, which leads to a decrease in the calibration accuracy of an instrument’s spectral response functions (SRF). The higher the calibration uncertainty of SRF, the worse the retrieval accuracy of the spectral characteristics of the targets. In this paper, an improved spectral calibration method based on a monochromator and the spectral absorptive characteristics of water vapor in the laboratory is presented. The water vapor spectral calibration method (WVSCM) uses the difference function to calculate the intrinsic DN response functions of the spectral channels located in the absorptive wavelength range of water vapor and corrects the wavelength offset of the monochromator via the least-square procedure to achieve spectral calibration throughout the full spectral responsive range of the hyper-spectrometer. The absolute spectral calibration uncertainty is ±0.125 nm. We validated the effectiveness of the WVSCM with two tunable semiconductor lasers, and the spectral wavelength positions calibrated by lasers and the WVSCM showed a good degree of consistency.