Manufacturing and characterization of a modified four-quadrant position sensitive detector for out-door applications

Position sensing detectors (PSDs) are useful in many applications such as vibration, displacement and triangulation measurements. In this paper we have constructed a novel structure, which has higher inter-electrode resistance than a lateral effect PSD and is more robust to atmospheric turbulence than a conventional four-quadrant PSD (Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 466 (2001) 183). The detector structure is useful for applications with detector windows less than 0.5×0.5 mm2, but the nonlinearity is the main concern for a detector of that size. Without any corrections for non-linearity the standard deviation of the error is 9 μm (2.2%). Using a simple analytical expression and a 2-d correction-function stored in a look-up table the positioning error is reduced to 6 (1.5%) and 2 (0.5%) μm, respectively.