Thermal imaging, particularly LWIR imaging, has several applications in commercial and security systems. The fundamental problem with the development of metalens is the lack of appropriate materials for LWIR applications. The development of silicon metalens is hampered by the material’s own LWIR spectral band absorption, although silicon is the ideal material for lithography due to its widespread use in CMOS applications. In this study, metalens working on LWIR spectral band has been designed and fabricated using the highly suitable material germanium and low-cost silicon. The focusing and imaging capacity of two types of metasurfaces has been investigated, and a comparison of the results has been presented in the paper.
Design and performance analysis of a high efficiency, nanohole based, polarization-insensitive, all-dielectric, immersion metalens is presented, which is to be monolithically integrated into a backside illuminated HgCdTe based photodetector with CdZnTe (4%) as the substrate material for MWIR (3-5 μm) applications. Although HgCdTe based IR imaging dominate the high-performance end of the market, enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance is still one of the challenges. This is typically dealt with either by improving the quantum efficiency (QE) with the employment of AR surfaces and photon trapping schemes or by decreasing the noise level with a reduction in detector volume. Decreasing either the thickness or the area of the detector, which comes with a performance degradation in QE in return, does the volume reduction. Nevertheless, the reduced QE can be recovered through light concentration with the employment of microlenses in the case of reduced area, which is typically realized with curved lenses presenting curve formation and packaging related issues. These issues can be overcome with the utilization of lithography-compatible metalenses carved into the substrate material. Thus, in this study, a nanohole based array of 40×40 is optimized to be monolithically integrated into CdZnTe (4%) substrate with a placement period of 1.0μm, a depth of around 4.9μm in order to construct a metalens structure with a numerical aperture of 0.63, and operation wavelength of 4.0μm. The nanohole width changes within a range of 0.35μm to 0.83μm in order to provide 2π phase coverage. Single layer of SiO2 based antireflective surface is introduced to the design in order to enhance the focusing efficiency, which is determined to be around 91%.
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