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.
Highlights
The concept of using compound semiconductors as radiation detectors was introduced in 1945 by Van Heerden [1,2], who was the first to be able to detect alpha and gamma rays with solid-state radiation counters
Since the 1990s, intense research activity has been carried out on other semiconductors for manufacturing detectors able to operate at room temperature, such as gallium arsenide (GaAs), cadmium telluride (CdTe), and cadmium zinc telluride (CdZnTe) [8,9,10,11,12]
Silicon carbide radiation detectors benefit from this property because the wide energy bandgap allows the achievement of very low leakage currents, i.e., very low noise levels, even at the high electric fields applied during their operation
Summary
The concept of using compound semiconductors as radiation detectors was introduced in 1945 by Van Heerden [1,2], who was the first to be able to detect alpha and gamma rays with solid-state radiation counters. In the case of X-ray detection and spectroscopy, the high breakdown field of 4H-SiC allows, in principle, the detector to work always in the regime of saturated-electron and hole-drift velocities, independently of the detector’s active region width When this operation condition is coupled with epitaxial material of high crystalline quality, a full and fast charge collection can be expected [16], as well as a high sensitivity, as already demonstrated [18]. Such properties allow SiC-based devices to be operated without any costly, bulky, and power-consuming cooling systems, as in the case of Si- or Ge-based devices, while maintaining an excellent signal-to-noise ratio over a wide range of temperatures. Further explanation of the electrical properties of SiC in connection with the ionizing detector performance benefits can be found in [16]
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