Plasmonic Enhanced Performance of an Infrared Detector Based on Carbon Nanotube Films

The carbon nanotube (CNT) has been proved to be a promising material in infrared detection, due to its many advantages of high mobility, strong infrared light absorption, and carrier collection efficiency. However, the absorption restriction from the single layer limits its effective utilization of incident light. In this paper, we introduce a plasmonic electrode structure in a CNT thin-film photodetector based on random deposited high-purity semiconducting CNTs, which can collect photoinduced carriers effectively and enhance light absorption at the same time. The largest enhancement of photocurrents can be achieved at 1650 nm wavelength with suitable plasmonic structure size. Especially, we further discuss the influence of plasmonic structures on the performance of devices. We demonstrate that the best performance improvement of the carbon nanotube detector with plasmonic structure can be enhanced by 13.7 times for photocurrent mode and 5.62 times for photovoltage mode compared to those devices without structure at 1650 nm resonant wavelength. At last, the plasmonic structures are applied on tandem photodetectors with nine virtual contacts, and both the photocurrent and photovoltage are increased. The application of plasmonic electrodes can improve detector performance and retain compact device structures, which shows great potential for optimizing infrared detectors based on nanomaterials.