Novel Tunable Millimeter-Wave Grating-Gated Plasmonic Detectors

We present the development of tunable, narrow-band plasmonic millimeter wave detectors. The current generation of this class of detector monolithically integrates a 2-D plasmonic absorber and a bolometric sensor in a GaAs/AlGaAs HEMT located at the vertex of a broad-band antenna. Response and transport measurements demonstrate absorption by high-order plasmon modes sensed by the integrated bolometer and with a two order of magnitude improvement in sensitivity and noise equivalent power over prior generations of 2-D plasmonic detectors. We compare these recent results with the state of the art in millimeter and submillimeter wave-detection technology.