SBIR-STTR Award

This proposal is intended to explore the feasibility of an innovative concept for an infrared photoconductor with enhanced characteristics, such as unit quantum efficiency, high photoconductive gain, and very low noise-equivalent-power at selected frequencies. The idea is based on establishing a relatively high finesse absorption-cavity internal to the detector element and adjusting the various parameters of the detector to achieve improved performance. A theoretical analysis demonstrates this concept and provides the relevant design parameters. This approach offers many other advantages over conventional photoconductors as well as impurity-band-conduction approach. Among those are suitability for array format and better immunity against ionizing radiation. The proposed project is a pioneering effort and addresses many of the problems associated with the development of integrated infrared detector arrays. This effort is directly applicable to many of NASA's projects for both space and ground-based observatories, laboratory spectroscopy, and air-borne astronomy and fits well within the scope of the activities outlined in the subtopic. Commercial Applications:The proposed concept has a potential for a broad range of applications. Should the approach prove successful, it can be extended to a variety of infrared and far-infrared detectors and can be used in a number of different systems. This concept can easily be implemented on a large scale for fabrication of integrated detector arrays which is the focal point of the space-based observatories. The basic idea can be expended to cover more complex ideas such as frequency selective tunable detection or can conceivably used instead of a grating in an interferometer or a spectrograph.