Engineering of plasmonic effects in photodetectors and high-efficiency photovoltaics

Integration of metal and dielectric nanostructures with semiconductor-based devices offers new opportunities for engineering the performance of high-efficiency photovoltaics and of photodetectors generally. We discuss here approaches in which plasmonic and related scattering effects are exploited to enable efficient coupling of photons into optical waveguide modes of semiconductor photodetector and photovoltaic devices. These approaches enable realization of improved power conversion efficiency in quantum-well solar cells, potentially leading to efficiencies in excess of the Shockley-Queisser single-homojunction limit, and to engineer the wavelength response of silicon-based photodetector structures using lithographically patterned metal scattering structures.