Dislocation reduction in LWIR HgCdTe epitaxial layers grown on alternate substrates

The technical objective of the Phase II effort is to implement the ideas developed in Phase I work to improve the thermal cycle annealing procedures and HgCdTe epitaxial growth procedures with the goal to demonstrate our approach to reduce the dislocation density to ~1x105 cm-2 and lower in LWIR HgCdTe epitaxial layers grown on Si substrates with a cut off wavelength of ~10 m at 77 K. At the end of the Phase II effort, the goal is to demonstrate fabrication of focal plane arrays of up to 2Kx2K size in Si substrate based LWIR HgCdTe, with new state of the art in detectivity performance, uniformity, operability and producibility.