Nanostructured diode for infrared photodetection through non degenerate two-photon absorption

Two-photon absorption (TPA) is a third order non-linear process that relies on the quasi-simultaneous absorption of two photons. Therefore, it has been proved to be an interesting tool to measure ultra-fast correlations(1) or to design all-optical switches.(2) Yet, due to the intrinsically low efficiency of the non-linear processes, these applications rest upon high peak power light sources such as femtosecond and picosecond pulsed laser. However TPA has also been noticed as an appealing new scheme for quantum infrared detection.(3, 4) Indeed, typical quantum detection of IR radiation is based on small gap semiconductors that need to be cooled down to cryogenic temperature to achieve sufficient detectivity. TPA enables the absorption of IR photons by wide gap semiconductors when pump photons are provided to complete optical transitions across the gap. Still, the low efficiency of TPA represents a difficulty to detect usual infrared photon fluxes. To tackle this issue, we combined three strategies to improve the detection efficiency. First, it has been proved theoretically and experimentally that using different pump and signal photon energies which is known as non degenerate TPA (NDTPA) help increasing the TPA efficiency by several orders of magnitude.(5) Thus we decided to work with different pump and signal wavelength. Secondly, since TPA is a local quasi-instantaneous process, both pump and signal photons must be temporarily and spatially co-localized inside the active medium. We made sure to maximize the overlap of the fields inside our device. Finally, it is well known that TPA has a quadratic dependence with the signal electric fields modulus, so we designed a specific nanostructure to enhance the signal field inside the active medium of the detector.