Effect of Substrate Thickness on Responsivity of Free-Membrane Bolometric Detectors

TL;DR

This paper investigates how substrate thickness and Debye temperature influence the responsivity of free-membrane bolometric detectors, providing calculations and optimizations for enhanced infrared detection performance.

Contribution

It introduces a finite-size scaling approach to analyze the impact of substrate properties on detector responsivity, identifying optimal parameters for maximum performance.

Findings

Responsivity varies anomalously at low substrate thicknesses.

Optimal substrate thickness and Debye temperature for maximum responsivity identified.

Calculated heat capacity and time constants for various materials.

Abstract

The effect of substrate thickness and its Debye temperature on the bolometric response of the freestanding-membrane type of superconductor transition-edge detectors is investigated. The investigation is based on the calculation of the variation of the specific heat per unit volume and the heat conductivity using the finite-size scaling method for different Debye temperatures and micron size thickness of substrate. We also calculated the heat capacity and time constant for various materials with Debye temperatures in the range of 600-1400K. The calculated results are compared to previously reported response values obtained theoretically and experimentally for the thermal-based infrared detectors. The IR response versus substrate thickness of these types of devices for different modulation frequencies is also presented. This inspected response at low thicknesses of substrate shows anomalistic behavior with respect to the previously reported results of response analyses. Here, we also obtained the optimized substrate thickness and Debye temperatures for maximum responsivity of these types of devices.