Polarization Sensitive QWIP Thermal Imager

Smart IR weapons must have excellent IR sensor characteristics that exploit as much information as possible to ensure guidance accuracy with low false alarms. Quantum Well Infrared Photoconductors (QWIPs) offer an opportunity to explore long wavelength polarization characteristics. A great deal of attention has been directed toward creating 2D gratings that produce large coupling coefficient. One side effect of grating coupling is the polarization dependency of the grating. While an undesirable effect in general, a specialty QWIP sensor that takes advantage of this inherent polarization might provide significant new information about polarization effects of IR signatures. This program is targeted towards creating a sensor capable of two registered, simultaneous, horizontal and vertical, polarized images.