High efficiency quasi-monochromatic infrared emitter

Giovanni Brucoli (1) , Patrick Bouchon (2) , Riad Haïdar (2) , Mondher Besbes (1) , Henri Benisty (1) , Jean-Jacques Greffet (1)

1 Laboratoire Charles Fabry / Naphel
2 ONERA - The French Aerospace Lab [Palaiseau]

Incandescent radiation sources are widely used as mid-infrared emitters owing to the lack of alternative for compact and low cost sources. A drawback of miniature hot systems such as membranes is their low efficiency, e.g., for battery powered systems. For targeted narrow-band applications such as gas spectroscopy, the efficiency is even lower. In this paper, we introduce design rules valid for very generic membranes demonstrating that their energy efficiency for use as incandescent infrared sources can be increased by two orders of magnitude. V C 2014 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4866342] Current low cost and compact size (0.1–10 mm 2) infrared (IR) sources are light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and hot membranes which exploit blackbody radiation u rad ðk; TÞ at a temperature T. They are needed for gas detection, for instance, to detect CO 2 using the infrared narrow band ½k 1 ; k 2 Š ½4:16 lm; 4:36 lmŠ. Unfortunately, both kinds of sources have poor efficiency which is a drawback to obtain autonomous devices. Indeed, due to the k À3 scaling of the spontaneous emission rate of excited carriers in semiconductors, mid-IR LEDs have a drastically lower efficiency than visible LEDs, typically 10 À4

Domains: Optics [physics.optics]

Giovanni Brucoli, Patrick Bouchon, Riad Haïdar, Mondher Besbes, Henri Benisty, et al.. High efficiency quasi-monochromatic infrared emitter. Applied Physics Letters, 2014, 104 (8), pp.081101. ⟨10.1063/1.4866342⟩. ⟨hal-01335095⟩