Fabrication of broadband HgCdTe photodetectors with biomimetic insect corneal arrays

Abstract

Broadband photodetectors are of great significance in a wide variety of technologically important areas. Inspired by bionics, insect cornea-mimicking microstructures could reduce surface reflection, thus enabling broadband detection. Here, we fabricate a broadband large-area (1280 × 1024) HgCdTe focal plane array photodetector based on biomimetic ZnS microarrays, which achieves high external quantum efficiency (> 60%, averaging 79%) across the broad wavelength range of 400 nm - 5000 nm. These results demonstrate that implementing biomimetic ZnS microstructures has effectively broadened the operational wavelength range of conventional HgCdTe infrared photodetectors to encompass the visible light spectrum. Our work achieves continuous visible-to-infrared spectral imaging and provides a beneficial route to fabricate broadband, large-area, high-performance photodetectors.