Plasmonic effects and applications to photoemission of III-V group semiconductor nanostructures.

Abstract

Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) has been explored for different applications in optoelectronic semiconductor materials due to its promising and profound optical properties in the recent decade. By using plasmonic nanostructures, optical performance of semiconductor heterostructures has benefitted a lot in localized electrical field amplification and propagating photo-emission gain enhancement. In this work, instead of overcoming ohmic loss in metal materials, we first made full use of this non-radiative thermal absorption and obtained a quantum well (QW) intermixing enhancement in a dielectric-metal-dielectric structure covered QW sample. Second, due to electrical field enhancement, a convenient method was used to adjust the SPR wavelength for a 4.5-fold photoluminescence (PL) enhancement of an InGaAs quantum well nanodisk array. In addition, SPR assisted PL propagation enhancement was illustrated by optical oscillations in a periodic plasmonic structure patterned InGaN multi-QW sample. Directionally enhanced PL propagation was observed as a guide to generate a surface plasmon laser.