Electrostatic Mechanism of Emission Enhancement in Hybrid Metal-semiconductor Light-emitting Heterostructures Page: 1

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Semiconductors and Light Emission
As our understanding of semiconductors has advanced, semiconductors have
come into use as sources for light emission. Semiconductor light emitters today are an
important aspect of modern technology, providing everything from backlighting for
modern LCD displays, head/tail-lights for cars, solid-state lasers for CD and DVD, solid-
state laser pointers, LED flashlights and so on. More recently advances have been
made towards using LEDs for solid-state indoor light sources [1, 2]. Due to the
ubiquitous nature of semiconductor LEDs and laser diodes (LDs) much attention has
been paid in recent years to the improvement of efficiency of semiconductor LED and
LD systems. Originally much of the effort spent in improving efficiency of these devices
was in optimization of growth techniques [3]. The quality of the heterostructures grown
for light emission has a significant impact on the internal quantum efficiency (IQE) of the
structure. Attention has also been paid to improving the external quantum efficiency
(EQE) of the device by improving things like the light extraction efficiency using
improved packaging methods [4].
1.2 Plasmonics
One of the current avenues of investigation for improvement of device efficiency
is through the modification of the IQE by resonant interaction of carriers within the light