Design and fabrication of the spin-photodiode based on non-magnetic III-V semiconductor heterostructures

In this paper, the authors propose a spin-photodiode (spin-PD) that can convert directly the magnitude of circular polarization of incident light into an electric analog signal. This novel device makes it possible to simplify the optical system based on circularly polarized light, such as the optical-chirality detection for organic compounds and stress detection in the solid objects. We show experimentally the device characteristics of III-V-based spin-PD, and discuss that the spin-PD operates as we expected from the model calculations