Silicon Carbide Microstrip Radiation Detectors

Donatella Puglisi; Giuseppe Bertuccio

doi:10.3390/mi10120835

Silicon Carbide Microstrip Radiation Detectors

Micromachines (Basel). 2019 Nov 30;10(12):835. doi: 10.3390/mi10120835.

Authors

Donatella Puglisi^{1

2}, Giuseppe Bertuccio^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Campus Como, 22100 Como, Italy.
² Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology, Sensor and Actuator Systems, Linköping University, 58183 Linköping, Sweden.
³ Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), Section Milano, 20133 Milan, Italy.

Abstract

Compared with the most commonly used silicon and germanium, which need to work at cryogenic or low temperatures to decrease their noise levels, wide-bandgap compound semiconductors such as silicon carbide allow the operation of radiation detectors at room temperature, with high performance, and without the use of any bulky and expensive cooling equipment. In this work, we investigated the electrical and spectroscopic performance of an innovative position-sensitive semiconductor radiation detector in epitaxial 4H-SiC. The full depletion of the epitaxial layer (124 µm, 5.2 × 10¹³ cm^-3) was reached by biasing the detector up to 600 V. For comparison, two different microstrip detectors were fully characterized from -20 °C to +107 °C. The obtained results show that our prototype detector is suitable for high resolution X-ray spectroscopy with imaging capability in a wide range of operating temperatures.

Keywords: microstrip detector; semiconductor radiation detector; silicon carbide.