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Experimental Evaluation of the Proton Non-ionizing Energy Loss in II-VI and III-V Superlattice Infrared Materials
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DOI:10.1007/s11664-026-12733-0.png)
Abstract
En 中文
Infrared materials used in space-based infrared sensing systems are susceptible to displacement damage from protons in the space radiation environment, leading to a progressive degradation of the system's sensitivity over its mission life. When protons traverse a material, they interact via both ionizing energy loss or linear energy transfer, generating excess electron-hole pairs, and non-ionizing energy loss (NIEL), generating interstitial/vacancy pairs. These additional defects often act as carrier recombination centers, which reduce a sensor's sensitivity. Here, the 130 K minority carrier lifetime is measured for a mid-wave infrared InAs/InAsSb superlattice and HgCdTe as a function of proton fluence to evaluate the lifetime degradation as a function of proton energy from 2 MeV to 52 MeV, to provide a measure of the relative proton-energy-dependent defect introduction rate in each of these materials. The results indicate that the product of the defect survival fraction and the defect impact on recombination (xi sigma nu\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\xi \sigma \nu $$\end{document}) is 130 & times;\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\times $$\end{document} higher for the InAs/InAsSb superlattice than for HgCdTe. Furthermore, the damage generally scales with NIEL as a function of proton energy; however, higher energy deviations from the scaling suggest either a proton energy dependence to the impact defect survival fraction product or inaccuracies in the theoretical NIEL trend for these materials. Example calculations of the on-orbit lifetime difference indicate that the deviations have a negligible impact due to the relatively low protons flux at higher energies.
Keywords:
Semiconductor
radiation damage
infrared sensors
space radiation environment
Journal
J
IF:
2.5
Papers:
485
Citations:
0
