Lighting up silicon nanoparticles with Mie resonances.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 30054488.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-018-05394-z and PMC identifier 6063972.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
As one of the most important semiconductors, silicon has been used to fabricate electronic devices, waveguides, detectors, solar cells, etc. However, the indirect bandgap and low quantum efficiency (10<sup>-7</sup>) hinder the use of silicon for making good emitters. For integrated photonic circuits, silicon-based emitters with sizes in the range of 100-300 nm are highly desirable. Here, we show the use of the electric and magnetic resonances in silicon nanoparticles to enhance the quantum efficiency and demonstrate the white-light emission from silicon nanoparticles with feature sizes of ~200 nm. The magnetic and electric dipole resonances are employed to dramatically increase the relaxation time of hot carriers, while the magnetic and electric quadrupole resonances are utilized to reduce the radiative recombination lifetime of hot carriers. This strategy leads to an enhancement in the quantum efficiency of silicon nanoparticles by nearly five orders of magnitude as compared with bulk silicon, taking the three-photon-induced absorption into account.