Electromagnetic Modeling of Quantum Well Infrared Photodetectors

Rigorous electromagnetic field modeling is applied to calculate the quantum efficiency of various quantum well infrared photodetector (QWIP) geometries. We found quantitative agreement between theory and experiment for corrugated-QWIPs, grating-coupled QWIPs, and enhanced-QWIPs, and the model explains adequately the spectral lineshapes of the quantum grid infrared photodetectors. After establishing our theoretical approach, we used the model to optimize the detector structures for 12-micron pixel pitch focal plane arrays.