Optical Response of Strained- and Unstrained-Silicon Cold-Electron Bolometers

These data demonstrate the increase in both responsivity and sensitivity for a cold-electron bolometer utilising a strained-silicon absorber when compared to an otherwise identical device using an unstrained absorber. In both devices the absober is also highly-doped. Both detectors have been studied at a phonon bath temperature of 350 mK. When observing a 77-Kelvin black-body source the noise-equivalent power has been found to be 3.0*10^-16 W/rtHz for the unstrained detector and 6.6*10^-17 W/rtHz for the strained detector. These data support the findings reported in the Brien et al., "Optical Response of Strained- and Unstrained-Silicon Cold-Electron Bolometers" in Journal of Low Temperature Physics 2016, LTD16 (2015) special issue.