Suppression of radiatively generated currents in infrared detectors

The radiative contribution to the dark current in an infrared detector has been measured over the temperature range 200–300 K. Good agreement was obtained between the measured currents and a theory based on radiative coupling between neighboring elements in the array. Detectors have been made which are close to radiatively limited and which become background limited in f/2 for temperatures below 200 K. By reverse biasing neighboring elements it has been possible to switch off up to 25% of the radiatively generated component of the dark current, demonstrating that radiative generation need not be a fundamental limitation for infrared detector arrays.