Conceptual Design of High-Spatial-Resolution Position-Sensitive Radiation Detector with Single-Electron Transistors

Abstract

We proposed a new microcalorimetric detector with four single-electron transistor (SET) read-out circuits to act as a real-time position-sensitive radiation detector with a spatial resolution of 100 nm. The proposed detector has micro- calrimeters in a two layer configuration, where the top and second layers work for position and energy determination, respectively. The position sensitive layer has four SETs that work as thermometers to decide the radiation incident position by the differences in SET temperatures caused by the heat flow in the layer. We investigated the SET performance and the heat flow in the substrate at cryogenic temperatures and, in addition, estimated the noise of the SET through simulation studies. It was founded that a temperature resolution of 10 mK could be achieved by using a pico-ammeter with a precision of 5.0 × 10−9 S. We successfully designed a detector configuration that would achieve the spatial and time resolution of 100 nm and 8 μs, respectively.