23 GHz operation of a room temperature photovoltaic quantum cascade detector at 5.35μm

We present a room temperature operated 5.35μm quantum cascade detector which was tested at high frequencies using an optical heterodyne experiment. Two slightly detuned continuous wave distributed feedback single mode quantum cascade lasers were used to generate a beating signal. The maximum frequency at which the resulting microwave signal could be detected was 23GHz. The cutoff behavior of our device was modeled with a simple RLC circuit and showed excellent agreement with the experimental data.