High Performance Nanoplasmonic UV/VIS/NIR Photodetector Fabricated in Ambient Condition

Abstract Surface plasmon based techniques are widely used to promote the exciton generation and light absorption in solar cells and photodetectors. In this work, a feasible approach for UV-VIS-NIR photodetection using plasmon induced silicon nanowires (SiNWs) and amorphous TiO2 heterostructure is presented. The photodetector shows excellent photoresponse up to 3.5 orders of magnitude enhancement with a rise/decay time constants of 0.75/0.5 µs. Under small bias (1V), the photodetector exhibits very high responsivity up to 49 A/W at 532 nm irradiation over a broadband wavelength range from 300–1100 nm. These figures of merits represent the excellent performance over the reported heterojunction based photodetectors. Our finding offers new opportunities to engineer plasmon-based nanostructures in different fields like chemical sensors, optoelectronics and nanophotonics applications.