Characteristics of a tunneling quantum-dot infrared photodetector operating at room temperature

We report high-temperature $(240–300\mathrm{K})$ operation of a tunneling quantum-dot infrared photodetector. The device displays two-color characteristics with photoresponse peaks at $\sim 6\mu \mathrm{m}$ and $17\mu \mathrm{m}$ . The extremely low dark current density of $1.55\mathrm{A}∕{\mathrm{cm}}^2$ at $300\mathrm{K}$ for $1\mathrm{V}$ bias is made possible by the tunnel filter. For the $17\mu \mathrm{m}$ absorption, the measured peak responsivity is $0.16\mathrm{A}∕\mathrm{W}$ $\left(300\mathrm{K}\right)$ for a bias of $2\mathrm{V}$ and the specific detectivity $D^{*}$ is $1.5\times {10}^7\mathrm{cm}{\mathrm{Hz}}^{1∕2}∕\mathrm{W}$ $\left(280\mathrm{K}\right)$ for a bias of $1\mathrm{V}$ . Excellent performance characteristics are also measured for the $6\mu \mathrm{m}$ photoresponse.