Influence of Electric Field on RTS Pixels in MCT FPA

Abstract Random telegraph signal (RTS) noise is widely discussed in the literature as a primary noise limiting the operating temperature in cooled infrared detectors. Moreover, the understanding of the underlying phenomena remains limited. The aim of this paper is to study RTS noise on a mercury cadmium telluride (MCT) detector in order to identify ways of improving its performance. To this end, we have performed measurements under different bias conditions and studied their impact on the frequency and amplitude of RTS jumps. The results show that the RTS amplitude increases with the bias voltage, confirming that RTS is located within the space charge region (SCR). To establish whether this increase could be due to electric field enhancement (EFE), a model of the EFE factor was calculated. However, there is no significant variation in the frequency of the RTS jumps, questioning the validity of RTS models based on a switching defect.