Proposal for a new cylindrical geometry for transverse infrared photodetectors

A new cylindrical geometry for a transverse photoconductive detector is proposed. It is shown that such a detector would exhibit significant improvements in responsivity, detectivity, speed of response, photoconductive gain, and uniformity of response over the standard rectangular geometry. From a practical point of view, the manufacture of discrete cylindrical detectors should be compatible with current state of the art for discrete devices. On the other hand, detector arrays could present greater difficulties.