Investigation of epitaxial silicon layers as a material for radiation hardened silicon detectors

Abstract

Epitaxial grown thick layers ({ge} 100 micrometers) of high resistivity silicon (Epi-Si) have been investigated as a possible candidate of radiation hardened material for detectors for high-energy physics. As grown Epi-Si layers contain high concentration (up to 2 {times} 10{sup 12} cm{sup {minus}3}) of deep levels compared with that in standard high resistivity bulk Si. After irradiation of test diodes by protons (E{sub p} = 24 GeV) with a fluence of 1.5 {times} 10{sup 11} cm{sup {minus}2}, no additional radiation induced deep traps have been detected. A reasonable explanation is that there is a sink of primary radiation induced defects (interstitial and vacancies), possibly by as-grown defects, in epitaxial layers. The ``sinking`` process, however, becomes non-effective at high radiation fluences (10{sup 14} cm{sup {minus}2}) due to saturation of epitaxial defects by high concentration of radiation induced ones. As a result, at neutron fluence of 1 {times} 10{sup 14} cm{sup {minus}2} the deep level spectrum corresponds to well-known spectrum of radiation induced defects in high resistivity bulk Si. The net effective concentration in the space charge region equals to 3 {times} 10{sup 12} cm{sup {minus}3} after 3 months of room temperature storage and reveals similar annealing behavior for epitaxial as compared to bulk silicon.