Organic diodes as monolithically integrated surface plasmon polariton detectors

Abstract

The authors show that organic p∕n heterojunction diodes enable the direct electric detection of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). The organic diodes are built from two organic semiconductor thin film layers with an area of 150×500μm2 deposited on an extended silver thin film. Besides serving as the bottom electrode of the diode this silver thin film is as well a waveguide feeding SPPs to the diode area. The authors visualize the direct SPP detection by a spatially resolved induced current map.