Infrared imaging system using nanocarbon materials

Abstract

Nanocarbon materials, such as carbon nanotubes and graphene, can potentially overcome the short comes in traditional infrared detector materials because of their excellent electrical and optical properties such as adjustable electrical band gap, low dark current, fast optical response time etc. This paper will present the development of an infrared imaging system that is capable of infrared imaging without cooling. The sensing elements of the system are carbon nanotubes and graphene. When they are illumined by an infrared light, the nano devices generate photocurrents, respectively. As a result, infrared images can be presented based on using compressive sensing after the collection of photocurrent from the nano devices. The development of this imaging system overcomes two major difficulties. First, the system uses singlepixel nano photodetector, so the pixel crosstalk phenomena of conventional sensor arrays can be eliminated. Second, the requirement of single-pixel unit reduces the manufacturing difficulties and costs. Under this compressive sensing camera configuration, 50 × 50 pixel infrared images can be reconstructed efficiently. The results demonstrated a possible solution to overcome the limitation of current infrared imaging. © 2012 SPIE.