Excitonic Insulator Enabled Ultrasensitive Terahertz Photodetection with Efficient Low-Energy Photon Harvesting

Despite the interest toward the terahertz (THz) rapidly increasing, the high-efficient detection of THz photon is not widely available due to the low photoelectric conversion efficiency at this low-energy photon regime. Excitonic insulator (EI) states in emerging materials with anomalous optical transitions and renormalized valence band dispersions render their nontrivial photoresponse, which offers the prospect of harnessing the novel EI properties for the THz detection. Here, an EI-based photodetector is developed for efficient photoelectric conversion in the THz band. High-quality EI material Ta₂ NiSe₅ is synthesized and the existence of the EI state at room temperature is confirmed. The THz scanning near-field optical microscopy experimentally reveals the strong light-matter interaction in the THz band of EI state in the Ta₂ NiSe₅ . Benefiting from the strong light-matter interaction, the Ta₂ NiSe₅ -based photodetectors exhibit superior THz detection performances with a detection sensitivity of ≈42 pW Hz^-1/2 and a response time of ≈1.1 µs at 0.1 THz at room temperature. This study provides a new avenue for realizing novel high-performance THz photodetectors by exploiting the emerging EI materials.