US-Turkey Cooperative Research: High Performance Resonant Cavity Enhanced Photodetectors and Applications

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Description: This award supports a cooperative project between a US scientist, Dr. Selim Unlu, from the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Boston University, and Dr. Ekmel Ozbay, Department of Physics, and Dr. Orhan Aytur, Department of Electrical Engineering at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. The research aims at improving the design, fabrication and characterization of compound semiconductor photodetectors in various material systems operating at near-IR spectral region. The research will emphasize the fabrication of high-performance photodetectors with bandwidth-efficiency products approaching 100GHz. These are suitable for use in high performance optical communication and signal processing systems that require high sensitivities, short response times, and low power consumption. Over the past few years a new family of optoelectronic devices has emerged whose performance is enhanced by placing the active device structure inside a Fabry-Perot resonant microcavity. The resonant cavity enhanced (RCE) detection scheme has been studied using computer simulation techniques, which showed they can impart drastic improvement to high-speed performance of conventional photodetectors. This project will build on the mature theory and existing experience in RCE detectors and to prototype high-performance ultrafast and nearly unity quantum efficiency photodetectors. Scope: This award allows cooperation of two teams of scientists whose capabilities complement each other to do important scientific work. The U.S. P.I. is an accomplished young scientist who is at an early stage in his academic and research career, but who has already received a grant from the NSF's CAREER program. The research under that grant is complementary to that planned in the present award. The two scientists at Bilkent have received their doctorates recently at universities in the United States. They have excellent facilities at their university for fabrication of the ultrafast photodetectors. One U.S. graduate student at Boston University will participate in the work done at Bilkent, and will have an opportunity for conducting research in an international setting. This award is jointly funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Electrical and Communication Systems.