Principal Investigator Marin Soljacic
Co-investigator Tomas Palacios
Project Website http://isnweb.mit.edu/project-1-2-1.html
his project aims to take advantage of many unique properties of graphene to demonstrate highly integrated night vision systems. Graphene is an ideal material for the advanced infrared detectors needed in the next generation of night vision systems. First, its bandgap can be tuned from 0 to ~200 meV by a variety of approaches, including nanoribbon fabrication, substrate engineering, and bilayer structures. In addition, the low losses predicted in graphene plasmonic devices enable highly integrated optical systems. Finally, graphene devices can be integrated on a variety of substrates, including silicon, transparent substrates and large area plastics. In this project we will use these and other properties to develop new infrared photodetector graphene structures, basic plasmonic building blocks, and study new strategies for light coupling in these systems. It is expected that these new devices will allow the development of a new generation of low-cost night vision systems with record detectivity, tunable spectral selectivity and fast time response.