Organic diodes as monolithically integrated surface plasmon polariton detectors

The authors show that organic p/n heterojunction diodes enable the direct electric detection of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). The organic diodes are built from two organic semiconductor thin film layers with an area of 150x500 mu m(2) deposited on an extended silver thin film. Besides serving as the bottom electrode of the diode this silver thin film is as well a waveguide feeding SPPs to the diode area. The authors visualize the direct SPP detection by a spatially resolved induced current map. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.