High Temperature Infrared Photon Detector Performance

The combined effects of suppressing Auger recombination by band structure engineering strained-layer superlattices (SL), suppressing radiative recombination by photon recycling, and suppressing both Auger and radiative recombination with carrier depletion are calculated quantitatively for long-wavelength and mid-wavelength InAs/ In x Ga 1- x Sb SL-based infrared detectors operating at temperatures between 200 and 300K. The results are compared to their HgCdTe counterparts. The SL performance is better in all cases. However, the carrier concentrations required for typical background limited performance (300K, 2fy field of view), ranging between about 1 × 10 13 and 4 × 10 13 cm -3 at 300K in long-wavelength to mid-wavelength SLs, are seen to be impractically low. The carrier concentration in a 11 Ωm photon detector yielding equivalent performance to an ideal 300K thermal detector is about 10 14 cm -3 . Large performance enhancement using carrier depletion therefore appears impractical even in optimized SLs.