Abstract: David Peters is a Georgia Tech graduate now at Sandia National Laboratories.  He will first give an overview of some of the photonic and plasmonic research efforts at Sandia and of the facilities available. More specifically, he will talk about currently on-going research using integrated subwavelength patterned metal nanoantennas on various detector materials for infrared detection: midwave infrared indium gallium arsenide antimonide detectors, longwave infrared graphene detectors, and shortwave infrared germanium detectors. These subwavelength structures, or nanoantennas, offer a means to make infrared detectors much thinner, thus lowering the dark current and improving performance.  The nanoantenna converts incoming plane waves to more tightly bound and concentrated surface waves (similar to surface plasmons).  The active material only needs to extend as far as these bound fields.  In the case of graphene detectors, which are only one or two atomic layers thick, such field concentration is a necessity for usable device performance, as single pass absorption is insufficient. Nanoantenna integration and fabrication vary considerably across these platforms as do the considerations taken into account during design.  Here he will discuss the motivation for these devices and show examples for the three material systems.  Characterization results are included for the midwave infrared detector.

Bio: David Peters is currently a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories in the Applied Photonic Microsystems organization.  He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2001.  From 2001 to 2004 he was a Director of Central Intelligence Post-Doc at Sandia investigating 2D and 3D photonic crystals.  His current interests include the theory, design, and modeling of diffractive optics, plasmonic devices, metamaterials, and photonic crystals with a focus on midwave and thermal infrared applications.