Analysis of the Performance of Infrared Detectors under Radiation Environment

A computer model for low-temperature silicon detectors has been used to show that blocking contacts have little effect on the response of detectors to pulses of radiation when the recombination lifetime is short compared to the transit time for the device. The same computer model has been used to demonstrate that spontaneous spiking noise in silicon detectors at large biases is apparently the result of avalanche generation of carriers in high-field regions near the device contacts. For HgCdTe detectors, the variation of detector response after a change in background illumination has been shown to be the result of a competition between Shockley-Read and Auger recombination in the bulk of the device.