The effect of plasmonic nanoparticles on the optoelectronic characteristics of CdTe nanowires.

In this work, a simple strategy is proposed to improve the device performance of photodetector by modifying plasmonic nanoparticles onto the surface of semiconductors nanostructure. Both experimental analysis and theoretical simulation show that the plasmonic metal nanoparticles (AuNPs) exhibits obvious localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) which can trap incident light efficiently, leading to enhanced photocurrents and improved performance of photoelectronic devices. It is also observed that the AuNPs modified CdTeNW photodetector exhibit apparent sensitivity to 510 nm light, to which pure CdTeNWs is virtually blind. What is more, after AuNPs decoration, the response speed of the photodetector is increased substantially from 6.12 to 1.92 s. It is believed that this result will open up new doors for manipulating light and further improving the efficiency of semiconductor nanostructures based optoelectronic devices.