High performance silicon hot electron bolometers AIP Conf. Abstract. We have characterized the I// noise in standard ion-implanted silicon thermistors, which are about 250 nm thick. We find that it is associated with the bulk of the implant, and is interpretable as a AR/R fluctuation that is independent of the bias and depends only on the doping density and resistivity, or electron temperature. This excess noise is large enough that it has a significant effect on the energy resolution or NEP of

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... a detector using these thermistors. The very steep temperature dependence of the I// noise suggested that it might be related to the conduction becoming twodimensional, and we have fabricated thicker detectors to test this hypothesis. Similar doped silicon thermistors that are 1500 nm thick show negligible I//noise, but otherwise behave identically to the thinner thermistors of the same volume. This simple change could provide a 40% improvement in resolution for some existing X-ray detectors.