After that will come EUV and EPL, Suzuki said. He urged the industry to be more proactive in establishing standards on a much quicker timetable. The development of coherent and tunable far-infrared radiation is essential for a wide variety of spectroscopy applications. Researchers have used femto-second laser pulses to generate far infrared radiation. However, the systems associated with these techniques are large scale, difficult to set up and operate, unreliable, and not easily tunable.
Bolometers convert absorbed incident radiation to current to provide high-sensitivity detection.
According to Berkeley professor Paul Richards, the key issue in astronomy applications is speed, which goes as the square of the sensitivity times the number of pixels in the array. Until recently, fabrication constraints limited array sizes to between 10 and 100 microbolometer structures, constraining the speed of the detectors. Richards and his group plan to change that. We've wired up an individual pixel and tested it. The next stage is to wire up the whole 1024 array.