Fabrication and evaluation of a freestanding pyroelectric detector made from single-crystal LiNbO_3 film

Abstract

We have packaged a rectangular 3 mm x 4 mm, 10-mum-thick Z-cut lithium niobate (LiNbO(3)) film produced by crystal ion slicing (CIS) and evaluated its performance as a pyroelectric optical detector. We justify the difficulty of preparing the film by showing that the freestanding detector has much greater sensitivity than the same detector bonded to a substrate. We compare the sensitivity of three CIS-film detectors with that of a detector based on a 230-mum-thick LiNbO(3) plate and describe the detectors' spatial uniformity and noise-equivalent power.