Wideband Heterodyne QWIP Receiver Development for Thermonuclear Fusion Measurements

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been developing heterodyne receivers for plasma diagnostic applications for over 20 years. One area of this work has been the development of a diagnostic system for the measurement of the energy of alpha particles created in a thermonuclear fusion reactor. These particles originate with an energy of 3.5 MeV and cool to the thermal energy of the plasma (around 15 keV) after several seconds. To measure the velocity distribution of these alpha particles, a Thomson scattering diagnostic is under development based on a high power CO{sub 2} laser at 10 microns with a heterodyne receiver. The Doppler shift generated by Thomson scattering of the alpha particles requires a wideband heterodyne receiver (greater than 10 GHz). Because Mercury-Cadimum-Telluride (MCT) detectors are limited to a bandwidth of approximately 2 GHz, a Quantum Well Infrared Photodetector (QWIP) detector was obtained from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and evaluated for its heterodyne performance using the heterodyne testing facility developed at ORNL.