The Influence of Rapid Thermal Annealing Processed Metal-Semiconductor Contact on Plasmonic Waveguide Under Electrical Pumping

The influence of Au/Ni-based contact formed on a lightly-doped (7.3×1017cm−3, Zn-doped) InGaAsP layer for electrical compensation of surface plasmon polariton (SPP) propagation under various rapid thermal annealing (RTA) conditions has been studied. The active control of SPP propagation is realized by electrically pumping the InGaAsP multiple quantum wells (MQWs) beneath the metal planar waveguide. The metal planar film acts as the electric contact layer and SPP waveguide, simultaneously. The RTA process can lower the metal-semiconductor electric contact resistance. Nevertheless, it inevitably increases the contact interface morphological roughness, which is detrimental to SPP propagation. Based on this dilemma, in this work we focus on studying the influence of RTA conditions on electrical control of SPPs. The experimental results indicate that there is obvious degradation of electrical pumping compensation for SPP propagation loss in the devices annealed at 400℃ compared to those with no annealing treatment. With increasing annealing duration time, more significant degradation of the active performance is observed even under sufficient current injection. When the annealing temperature is set at 400℃ and the duration time approaches 60s, the SPP propagation is nearly no longer supported as the waveguide surface morphology is severely changed. It seems that eutectic mixture stemming from the RTA process significantly increases the metal film roughness and interferes with the SPP signal propagation.