The plasma waves in gated two-dimensional electron gas have a linear dispersion law, similar to the sound waves. The transistor channel is acting as a resonator cavity for the plasma waves, which can reach frequencies in the THz range for a sufficiently short gate length field effect transistors. A variety of possible applications of field effect transistor operating as a THz device were suggested. In particular, it was shown that the nonlinear properties of plasma oscillations can be utilized for THz tunable detectors. During the last few years THz detection related to plasma wave instabilities in nanometer size field effect transistors was demonstrated experimentally. In this work we review our recent experimental results on the resonant plasma wave detection at cryogenic and room temperatures.
We report on investigations of photovoltaic response of Si-MOSFETs subjected to terahertz radiation in high magnetic fields. Then a DC drain-to-source voltage is developed that shows singularities in magnetic fields corresponding to paramagnetic resonance conditions. These singularities are investigated as a function of incident frequency, temperature and two-dimensional carrier density. We tentatively attribute these resonances to spin transitions of the electrons bound to Si dopants and discuss the possible physical mechanism of the photovoltaic signal generation.
We report on the resonant detection of a 3.1 THz radiation produced by a quantum cascade laser using a 250 nm gate length GaAs/AlGaAs field effect transistor at liquid nitrogen temperature. We show that the physical mechanism of the detection is related to the plasma waves excited in the transistor channel. The detection is enhanced by increasing the drain current and driving the transistor into saturation regime. These results clearly show that plasma wave nanometer-size transistors can be used as detectors in all-solid-state terahertz systems where quantum cascade lasers act as sources.
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