Hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) has remarkable radiation resistance properties and can be deposited on a lot of different substrates. A-Si:H based particle detectors have been built since mid 1980s as planar p-i-n or Schottky diode structures; the thickness of these detectors ranged from 1 to 50 micron. However MIP detection using planar structures has always been problematic due to the poor S/N ratio related to the high leakage current at high depletion voltage and the low charge collection efficiency. The usage of 3D detector architecture can be beneficial for the possibility to reduce inter-electrode distance and increase the thickness of the detector for larger charge generation compared to planar structures. Such a detector can be used for future hadron colliders for its radiation resistance and also for X-ray imaging. Furthermore the possibility of a-Si:H deposition on flexible materials (like kapton) can be exploited to build flexible and thin beam flux measurement detectors and x-ray dosimeters.
Artificially-grown diamond crystals have unique properties that make them suitable as solid-state particle detectors and dosimeters in high-radiation environments. We have been using sensors based on single-crystal diamond grown by chemical vapour deposition for dosimetry and beam-loss monitoring at the SuperKEKB collider. Here we describe the assembly and the suite of test and calibration procedures adopted to characterise the diamond-based detectors of this monitoring system. We report the results obtained on 28 detectors and assess the stability and uniformity of response of these devices.
DEPFET pixel detectors are unique devices in terms of energy and spatial resolution because very low noise (ENC = 2.2e at room temperature) operation can be obtained by implementing the amplifying transistor in the pixel cell itself. Full DEPFET pixel matrices have been built and operated for autoradiographical imaging with imaging resolutions of 4.3 +- 0.8 um at 22 keV. For applications in low energy X-ray astronomy the high energy resolution of DEPFET detectors is attractive. For particle physics, DEPFET pixels are interesting as low material detectors with high spatial resolution. For a Linear Collider detector the readout must be very fast. New readout chips have been designed and produced for the development of a DEPFET module for a pixel detector at the proposed TESLA collider (520x4000 pixels) with 50 MHz line rate and 25 kHz frame rate. The circuitry contains current memory cells and current hit scanners for fast pedestal subtraction and sparsified readout. The imaging performance of DEPFET devices as well as present achievements towards a DEPFET vertex detector for a Linear Collider are presented.
While designed primarily for X-ray imaging applications, the Medipix3 ASIC can also be used for charged-particle tracking. In this work, results from a beam test at the CERN SPS with irradiated and non-irradiated sensors are presented and shown to be in agreement with simulation, demonstrating the suitability of the Medipix3 ASIC as a tool for characterising pixel sensors.
Radiation damage effects represent one of the limits for technologies to be used in harsh radiation environments as space, radiotherapy treatment, high-energy phisics colliders. Different technologies have known tolerances to different radiation fields and should be taken into account to avoid unexpected failures which may lead to unrecoverable damages to scientific missions or patient health.
The motivation for investigating the use of GaAs as a material for detecting particles in experiments for High Energy Physics (HEP) arose from its perceived resistance to radiation damage. This is a vital requirement for detector materials that are to be used in experiments at future accelerators where the radiation environments would exclude all but the most radiation resistant of detector types.