Low-cost, uncooled photodetectors
operating in the spectral
regions
of mid-wavelength infrared (MWIR = 3–5 μm) and long-wavelength
infrared (LWIR = 9–12 μm) are anticipated to dominate
the future infrared market with its impacts broadly ranging from night
driving assist, to drone and microsatellite mounts, to machine vision
and augmented goggles. Research interest in lead selenide (PbSe),
an 80-year-old technology, has reemerged in recent years, due to its
advantageous low manufacturing cost and Auger-suppression properties,
as a potential candidate to bridge the current MWIR technology gap.
While chemical bath deposition (CBD) and vapor phase deposition (VPD)
have been the two major established techniques to fabricate PbSe photoconductive
films, they can benefit by adopting the emerging solution-processed
fabrication methods to improve the detector manufacturability. In
this study, we report on the MWIR photoconductive film derived from
colloidal PbSe nanocrystals and demonstrate detectors that reach a
specific detectivity of 8 × 108 Jones (200 Hz, 2 V
bias) at room temperature. While the sensitization process bears a
similarity to the conventional CBD- or VPD-grown PbSe films, the colloidal
nanocrystal nature of the starting material requires different processing
conditions to reach high responsivity, and those are highlighted in
this work. In light of the emergent need for low-cost, uncooled MWIR
photodetector technology, the results presented here may serve as
a first stepping stone toward future digital additive manufacturing
of infrared sensors and imagers.