Influence of high energy particle radiation on GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well infrared photodetectors

We report on the influence of high energy proton, alpha, oxygen ion and gold ion radiation on the performance of GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well infrared photodetectors. The particle energies of proton, alpha and oxygen ions ranged from 0.8 MeV to 30 MeV and the fluences varied from to . The energy of Au ions was 1.5 GeV and the fluence ranged from to . The dark current and spectral response of irradiated devices were measured. A device operability defined by the fractional reduction of detector responsivity was used to evaluate the performance degradation. Device damage increases with fluence for all particles. It also increases with the mass of the ion and with decreasing energy of the particle.