What is it about?
This study highlights efforts to combine two distinct avalanche photodiode designs into a single, solid-state detector. Combining the benefits of both a "staircase" APD and a conventional APD results in a photodetector device with low-noise, and low dark current performance, with a gain ceiling orders of magnitude higher than its staircase counterparts.
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Why is it important?
Technologies like LIDAR, telecommunications, and quantum computing are increasingly relying on high sensitivity infrared photodetectors. Improving the signal-to-noise ratio in our detectors will ultimately determine what level of signals we can see and process. This work attempts to drive forward III-V semiconductor photodiodes for this reason.
Perspectives
I believe this work is valuable not only for the "hard" detector metrics, such as a sub-McIntyre excess noise and dark current densities less than half of a staircase APD with equal gain, but also because it unlocks a new design space for avalanche photodiodes. Using multiple different impact ionization schemes within a single two-terminal detector is rarely seen and could be thoroughly explored in the future. I would love for this to understood as work that lays the foundation for "cascaded multiplier" devices moving forward.
Joshua Andrew McArthur
University of Texas at Austin
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Demonstration of the AlInAsSb cascaded multiplier avalanche photodiode, Applied Physics Letters, July 2023, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0155035.
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