ABSTRACT
Photonic technologies and their response to radiation play key roles in space systems, but are also important for terrestrial applications such as medical imaging, scientific, and commercial. Photonic devices in the natural space environment are bombarded by a variety of charged particles including electrons, trapped protons, cosmic rays, and solar particles. The semiconductor material quality is high so that there is at least an order of magnitude smaller density of recombination and generation centers as compared to the majority carrier concentration. The chapter examines not only the mean dark current performance under radiation, but also the inherent particle-induced dark current nonuniformities and hot pixel production. One of the most important performance parameters for a charge-coupled device is the charge transfer efficiency, which is the fraction of signal charge transferred from pixel to pixel during readout. Large format arrays with 16 million pixels or more are available, and require extremely low trap densities in order to operate correctly.
