Abstract
Numerous fast semiconductor photodetectors have been developed in the last decade. These devices have used short carrier lifetimes1,2 or large electric fields and small geometries3,4 to produce fast impulse responses. In contrast to these methods of making fast photodetectors, we propose a photovoltaic device whose operating speed is due to diffusion of carriers. This device involves interfering light waves to form a grating of photoexcited carriers with a sinKx spatial dependence. Such a distribution will decay with a time constant of (DK2)−1, where D is the material’s diffusion constant. Because K can be made very large, the response time can be extremely short. If the grating is formed in silicon, for example, with optical beams of 1 μm wavelength having antiparallel k-vectors, then the diffusion-driven detector response time will be 0.25 psec.
© 1985 Optical Society of America
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