C. Thomas Elliott

Charles Thomas Elliott (known as Tom Elliott), FRS, CBE, is a leading scientist in the fields of narrow gap semiconductor and infrared detector research. Hailing from county Durham, after gaining his Ph.D., he worked at the University of Manchester before joining TRE at Great Malvern in the late 1960s. In the 1970s he invented the SPRITE detector (Signal PRocessing In The Element) which was also known as the TED (Tom Elliott's Detector). This was a photoconductor device in which the infrared scene was scanned across the detector (made from HgCdTe) at the same rate as the carriers drifted under an applied d.c. bias current. This device decame part of TICM - the standard UK thermal imaging common module used since the 1980s by UK armed forces. Tom Elliott received a Rank Prize in 1982 for this work.

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Tom Elliott also contributed to the development of indium antimonide as an infrared detector, magnetic sensor and fast transistor material. He was involved in the exploitation of negative luminescence in diode structures.

He retired from the successor to TRE, DERA in 1999 and is an honorary professor at Heriot-Watt University.

The new conference centre at DERA Malvern (now QinetiQ) has been named Tom Elliot in his honour.

Bibliography

• Infrared Detectors and Emitters: Materials and Devices, edited by Peter Capper and C T Elliott, Springer (2000) ISBN 0-7923-7206-9
• Uncooled InSb/In_1–xAl_xSb mid-infrared emitter, T. Ashley, C. T. Elliott, N. T. Gordon, R. S. Hall, A. D. Johnson, and G. J. Pryce, Applied Physics Letters Vol. 64, Iss. 18, pp. 2433-2435 (1994) doi:10.1063/1.111981
• Negative luminescence and its applications, C. T. Elliott, Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Vol. 359, Number 1780 pp. 567 - 579 (2001) doi:10.1098/rsta.2000.0743