Thermal Modelling and Characterisation of Semiconductor Bolometers

Abstract

A revised version of the Griffin & Holland ideal semiconductor bolometer model is presented and its use in determining bolometer properties and parameters from experimental load curve measurements is discussed. We show that degeneracy between some bolometer parameters can only be broken by model fitting a family of load curves over a range of bath temperatures, and that measurements with the bolometer blanked (zero absorbed radiant power) are essential for unambiguous determination of the main parameters. The influence of measurement errors on parameter recovery is analysed using synthetic noisy data sets.