Analysis of aluminum nano-gratings assisted light reflection reduction in GaAs metal-semiconductor-metal photodetectors

Plasmonics-based GaAs metal-semiconductor-metal photodetector (MSM-PD) with aluminum nano-gratings was proposed. A detailed numerical study of subwavelength nanogratings behavior to reduce the light reflection is performed by finite-difference time domain (FDTD) algorithm. The geometric parameters of nano-gratings, such as aperture width, the nano-gratings height, the duty cycles are optimized for subwavelength metal nanogratings on GaAs substrate and their impact on light reflection below the conventional MSM-PD is confirmed. Simulation results show that a light reflection factor around 15% can be obtained near the wavelength of 900 nm with optimized MSM-PDs, and in visible light spectrum, the Al nano-gratings show better performance than Au nano-gratings.