Highly Selective CMOS-Compatible Mid-Infrared Thermal Emitter/Detector Slab Design Using Optical Tamm-States

In this work, we propose and evaluate a concept for a selective thermal emitter based on Tamm plasmons suitable for monolithic on-chip integration and fabrication by conventional complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible processes. The original design of Tamm plasmon structures features a purely one-dimensional array of layers including a Bragg mirror and a metal. The resonant field enhancement next to the metal interface corresponding to optical Tamm states leads to resonant emission at the target wavelength, which depends on the lateral dimensions of the bandgap structure. We demonstrate the application of this concept to a silicon slab structure instead of deploying extended one dimensional layers thus enabling coupling into slab waveguides. Here we focus on the mid-infrared region for absorption sensing applications, particularly on the CO(2) absorption line at 4.26 µm as an example. The proposed genetic-algorithm optimization process utilizing the finite-element method and the transfer-matrix method reveals resonant absorption in case of incident modes guided by the slab and, by Kirchhoff’s law, corresponds to emittance up to 90% depending on different choices of the silicon slab height when the structure is used as a thermal emitter. Although we focus on the application as an emitter in the present work, the structure can also be operated as an absorber providing adjusted lateral dimensions and/or exchanged materials (e.g., a different choice for metal).