DESIGN PARAMETERS OF A RESONANT INFRARED PHOTOCONDUCTOR WITH UNITY QUANTUM EFFICIENCY

A new concept for an infrared photoconductor with enhanced characteristics, such as unity quantum efficiency, high photoconductive gain, and very low noise equivalent power is introduced. The idea revolves around establishing a relatively high finesse absorption-cavity internal to the detector element. A theoretical analysis demonstrates this concept and provides some design guidelines. This concept offers many advantages, especially for low-background astronomy, and may prove to be technologically simpler to implement than other concepts such as the impurity-band-conduction approach.