Heterodyne detection for staring hexagonal detector array

Optical heterodyne detection is a powerful technique where a weak signal beam is mixed with a relatively strong local oscillator beam. This detection scheme employs photon detection process where signal current is proportional to the square of the electric field. The most important issue of this detection process is the heterodyne mixing efficiency. This decreases due to the loss of coherence between the signal and the local oscillator wave fronts for a large detector arrays. In the present study, an array of hexagonal pixel geometries are considered and the improvement in the mixing efficiency as well as the signal-to-noise (SNR) are addressed over the same area square pixel geometries.