Impact of the Metal Adhesion Layer on the Radiation Power of Plasmonic Photoconductive Terahertz Sources

The use of plasmonic contact electrodes in a photoconductive terahertz source offers high optical-to-terahertz conversion efficiencies. The high efficiency is because plasmonic contact electrodes concentrate a large portion of the incident optical pump beam in close proximity to the contact electrodes. By reducing the average transport path length of the photo-generated carriers from the contact electrodes, a larger number of the photocarriers drift to the terahertz radiating elements of the photoconductive source within a sub-picosecond time scale. Therefore, higher terahertz radiation power levels are achieved compared to a similar photoconductive source without plasmonic contact electrodes. Au is a preferred metal for plasmonic contact electrodes because of the strong plasmonic enhancement factors it offers at near-infrared optical wavelengths. However, it requires an adhesion layer to stick well to most III-V semiconductor substrates used in photoconductive terahertz sources. In this paper, we analyze the impact of the Au adhesion layer on the performance of plasmonic photoconductive sources fabricated on a GaAs substrate. Our analysis suggests that Cr is the most promising adhesion layer for plasmonic contact electrodes. We show that the use of a Cr adhesion layer instead of Ti, which is used in previously demonstrated plasmonic photoconductive sources, offers up to an 80% enhancement in the generated terahertz powers. We report record-high terahertz power emissions of up to 6.7 mW from plasmonic photoconductive sources with Cr/Au contacts.