National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC

Isaac Ruiz

David W Peters

Thomas Edwin Beechem, Iii

Stephen Wayne Howell

Michael Goldflam

Paul Davids

Anna Tauke-Pedretti

Richard Karl Harrison

Jeffrey B Martin

A monolithically integrated, tunable infrared pixel comprises a combined broadband detector and graphene-enabled tunable metasurface filter that operate as a single solid-state device with no moving parts. Functionally, tunability results from the plasmonic properties of graphene that are acutely dependent upon the carrier concentration within the infrared. Voltage induced changes in graphene's carrier concentration can be leveraged to change the metasurface filter's transmission thereby altering the 'colors' of light reaching the broadband detector and hence its spectral responsivity. The invention enables spectrally agile infrared detection with independent pixel-to-pixel spectral tunability.

Tunable infrared pixels having unpatterned graphene layer and conductive metasurface

A radiation field is detected or imaged using one or more junction devices in which a two-dimensional conductor layer is capacitively coupled to a semiconductor absorber layer. In the junction devices, pixel-level amplification and read-out are accomplished through the photogating of the devices by absorption within the absorber layer while it is in a state of deep depletion. When the two-dimensional conductor is graphene, we refer to a device operating in that manner as a deeply depleted graphene-oxide-semiconductor (DGOS) detector.

Radiation detector using a graphene amplifier layer

An actively tunable optical filter can control the amplitude of reflected infrared light. The filter exploits the dependence of the excitation energy of plasmons in a continuous and unpatterned sheet of graphene, on the Fermi-level, which can be controlled by conventional electrostatic gating. An exemplary filter enables simultaneous modification of two distinct spectral bands whose positions are dictated by the device geometry and graphene plasmon dispersion. Within these bands, the reflected amplitude can be varied by over 15% and resonance positions can be shifted by over 90 cm. Electromagnetic simulations verify that tuning arises through coupling of incident light to graphene plasmons by a nanoantenna grating structure. Importantly, the tunable range is determined by a combination of graphene properties, device structure, and the surrounding dielectrics, which dictate the plasmon dispersion. Thus, the underlying design is applicable across a broad range of infrared frequencies.

Tunable graphene-based infrared reflectance filter having patterned nanoantenna layer and unpatterned graphene layer

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Albuquerque, NM, United States of America

Isaac Ruiz