Is it useful to heat pyroelectric detectors to improve the signal-to-noise-ratio?
No! Pyroelectric detectors for FTIR spectrometers are sometimes operated at higher temperatures of about 50C because here a special pyroelectric crystal (DTGS) is used instead of LiTaO3 used by InfraTec. This DTGS crystal material has a Curie temperature of about 59C, LiTaO3 shows 620C. Near to the Curie temperature the pyroelectric coefficient and resulting signal voltages are growing remarkably but with the side effect of a very high temperature coefficient. A visible signal increase by warming the LiTaO3 detector is not possible due to the very high Curie temperature but otherwise the temperature coefficient of LiTaO3 is extremely low. Heating of LiTaO3 detectors (40 … 60C) is only common for gas analyzers to avoid a condensation of wet gases or to reduce the optical filter drift by temperature stabilizing.
