Ultra-subwavelength resonators for high temperature high performance quantum detectors

In this article we have investigated two important properties of metallic nano-resonators which can substantially improve the temperature performances of infrared quantum detectors. The first is the antenna effect that increases the effective surface of photon collection and the second is the subwavelength metallic confinement that compresses radiation into very small volumes of interaction. To quantify our analysis we have defined and discussed two figures of merit, the collection area A(coll) and the focusing factor F. Both quantities depend solely on the geometrical parameters of the structure and can be applied to improve the performance of any detector active region. In the last part, we describe three-dimensional electronic nano-resonators that provide highly subwavelength confinement of the electromagnetic energy, beyond the microcavity limits and illustrate that these device architectures have a tremendous potential to increase the temperature of operation of infrared quantum detectors.