Design of Microlens Arrays for Thermal Imaging with Spintronic Poisson Bolometers

TL;DR

This paper develops design guidelines for spherical microlens arrays to improve light collection in spintronic Poisson bolometer infrared detectors, enhancing their sensitivity and optical efficiency.

Contribution

It provides the first systematic simulation and experimental validation of microlens designs tailored for spintronic Poisson bolometer arrays in MWIR thermal imaging.

Findings

Microlens geometries significantly improve light collection efficiency.

Scaling laws relate sensor size, microlens design, and sensitivity.

Experimental fabrication confirms the practicality of the proposed designs.

Abstract

Infrared (IR) detectors are widely used due to their ability to sense thermal radiation. Recently, a room-temperature infrared detector known as the spintronic Poisson bolometer was introduced. While offering fast digital readout, its sensitivity is currently limited by its small photosensitive area and array fill factor. Beyond this specific detector, many emerging detector architectures also require substantial in-pixel electronics or engineering tradeoffs, which can reduce the fill factor and degrade optical coupling efficiency. In this work, we present design guidelines for spherical plano-convex microlens arrays that enhance light collection in spintronic Poisson bolometer arrays in the mid-wave infrared (MWIR). Guided by the simulations, we fabricate a microlens array sample to demonstrate that the chosen geometrical parameters are experimentally attainable and compatible with the fabrication process. We then systematically explore the scaling laws between sensor active size, microlens geometries, and the resulting light collection metrics, yielding practical design rules that are broadly relevant to MWIR detector arrays with limited active area. A radiometric-stochastic model is used to quantify the resulting sensitivity improvements for the spintronic Poisson bolometer. Our work is the first systematic simulation of a microlens design with spintronic Poisson bolometer arrays, bridging microphotonics, spintronics, and thermal imaging.