[66.06] Dark Signal Characterization of 1.7 micron cutoff devices for SNAP

AAS 205th Meeting, 9-13 January 2005
Session 66 The SNAP Focal Plane: Spectrograph and Imager
Poster, Tuesday, January 11, 2005, 9:20am-6:30pm, Exhibit Hall

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[66.06] Dark Signal Characterization of 1.7 micron cutoff devices for SNAP

R. M. Smith (Caltech), SNAP Collaboration

We report initial progress characterizing non-photometric sources of error -- dark current, noise, and zero point drift -- for 1.7 micron cutoff HgCdTe and InGaAs detectors under development by Raytheon, Rockwell, and Sensors Unlimited for SNAP. Dark current specifications can already be met with several detector types. Changes to the manufacturing process are being explored to improve the noise reduction available through multiple sampling. In some cases, a significant number of pixels suffer from popcorn noise, with a few percent of all pixels exhibiting a ten fold noise increase. A careful study of zero point drifts is also under way, since these errors can dominate dark current, and may contribute to the noise degradation seen in long exposures.

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