Characterization of new components for a miniaturized heterodyne infrared spectrometer

We report on the development and testing of the building blocks of a possible compact heterodyne setup in the mid-infrared, which becomes particularly relevant for flight instrumentation. The local oscillator is a Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL) source at 8.6 μm operable at room temperature. The beam combination of the source signal and the local oscillator will occur by means of integrated optics for the 10 μm range, which was characterized in the lab. In addition we investigate the use of superlattice detectors in a heterodyne instrument. This work shows that these different new components can become valuable tools for a compact heterodyne setup.