Light emission from inelastic electron tunneling has been demonstrated for 40 years. The ultrafast response rate and the ultracompact footprint make it promising for high-speed miniaturized light sources. But the application of the tunnel junction is limited by extremely low external quantum efficiency due to the low proportion of inelastic tunneling electron and wave vector mismatch between surface plasmons and photon emission. Here, we present a plasmonic-enhanced metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) junction coupled to a silicon waveguide with a coplanar electrode connected to a nanoantenna. The proposed tunnel junction can be fabricated using existing semiconductor planar processes to achieve controllable barrier thickness and quality for vertical current injection. Finally, an electrically driven light source with a radiation power nearly 8000 times higher than the spontaneous emission power in free space is shown to be achievable with the new structure at an operating wavelength of 1.31 µm. It is 510-fold higher than that of typical planar MIS junctions.

中文翻译：

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波导集成隧道结的等离子体增强光发射

非弹性电子隧穿的发光已经被证明了40年。超快的响应速度和超紧凑的尺寸使其成为高速微型光源的有希望的。但是，由于非弹性隧穿电子的比例低以及表面等离子体激元与光子发射之间的波矢量失配，隧道结的应用受到极低的外部量子效率的限制。在这里，我们提出了一个等离子增强的金属-绝缘体-半导体（MIS）结，该结耦合到具有与纳米天线相连的共面电极的硅波导。可以使用现有的半导体平面工艺来制造建议的隧道结，以实现可控的势垒厚度和垂直电流注入的质量。最后，用这种新结构，在工作波长为1.31 µm的情况下，可以实现辐射功率比自由空间中自发发射功率高将近8000倍的电动光源。它比典型的平面MIS结高510倍。