NEW TYPE OF INFRARED AND FAR INFRARED FOCAL PLANE DETECTOR WITH VERY LOW NEP

A NEW TYPE OF INFRARED MULTIPIXEL STARING ARRAY BASED UPON THE RECENTLY OBSERVED PHENOMENON OF PHOTOFLUXONICS IS BEING DEVELOPED. THE SENSOR IS BASED ON A SIMPLE JOSEPHSON JUNCTION AND IS THE MAGNETIC ANALOG OF A CCD PHOTOSENSOR, A NOVEL DEVICE GEOMETRY ALLOWS THE DIRECT CONVERSION OF PHOTONS TO FLUXONS. THE QUANTITIZED NATURE OF THE PHOTON TO FLUXON CONVERSION PROCESS AFFORDS A VERY LOW NEP. EXPERIMENTS INDICATE THAT SINGLE QUANTUM SENSITIVITY IN THE INFRARED AND FAR INFRARED RANGE OF THE SPECTRUM IS POSSIBLE. AN ARRAY OF SUCH DETECTORS WOULD BE AN ALL THIN FILM, MONOLITHIC, FOCAL PLANE DEVICE WITH INHERENTLY LOW POWER CONSUMPTION. IT WILL BE POSSIBLE TO IMPLEMENT THE ASSOCIATED READOUT ELECTRONICS ON THE SAME SUBSTRATE. RESEARCH DEMONSTRATES THE PHOTOFLUXONIC EFFECT IN A NB-AL-AL2-O3-NB JOSEPHSON JUNCTION AND, ACCORDING TO THE RESULTS, OPTIMIZES THE PRELIMINARY DESIGN FOR AN ARRAY OF SUPERCONDUCTING PHOTOSENSTITIVE PIXELS.