Plasmonics-Based Light Detector Could Support Precision Agriculture

A new, broad-spectrum photodetector that can be implemented on a single chip has been developed at Duke University. The photodetector spans a range of light frequencies by using on-chip spectral filters created with electromagnetic materials. The camera’s technology is based on plasmonics — the use of nanoscale physical phenomena to trap specific frequencies of light. For their plasmonics-based approach to building a thermal camera with an on-chip filter, professor Maiken Mikkelsen and her team created silver, 100-nm-wide cubes and placed them on a transparent film positioned a few nm above a thin layer of gold. When light hit the surface of a nanocube, it excited the electrons in the silver, trapping the light’s...