Plasmonic-Metal Nanostructures-Enhanced Photoconductive Terahertz Emission and Detection

Photoconductive antennas based on low-temperature gallium arsenide (LT-GaAs) with a gold plasmonic-gold grating made of nanorods and nanoislands have been developed and fabricated. The antennas were produced using molecular beam epitaxy and electron-beam nanolithography. LT-GaAs samples with a high annealing temperature of 943 K were employed in the fabrication process. It has been demonstrated that plasmonic nanostructures significantly enhance the efficiency of light-to-terahertz radiation conversion by photoconductive antennas.