Picosecond Time Resolution with Avalanche Amorphous Selenium

Abstract

Ultrafast photodetection has traditionally been performed with crystalline photodetectors, which tend to suffer from low production yield, suboptimal detection efficiency, and operational limitations that restrict their potential applications. Amorphous selenium is a unique, disordered photosensing material in which carrier transport can be shifted entirely from localized to extended states where holes get hot, resulting in deterministic, non-Markovian impact ionization avalanche, causing selenium to exhibit characteristics similar to crystalline photoconductors. For the first time, we have fabricated a multiwell selenium detector using nanopillars that achieves both avalanche gain and unipolar time-differential charge sensing. We experimentally show how these features together improve selenium's temporal performance by nearly 4 orders of magnitude, allowing us to achieve picosecond timing jitter suitable for a variety of ultrafast applications. Such a detector would be a viable low-cost, high production yield alternative for picosecond photodetection and imaging.