Study of edgeless radiation detector with 3D spatial mapping technique

Abstract

Edgeless radiation detector has gained increased attention due to its superiority in the defect-free edge fabrication and the capability to minimize the insensitive area at the detector edge. The doped edge in the edgeless detector is at the same potential with the back plane and causes a local distortion of the electric field at the detector edge. The deformed electric field alters the charge collection of the edge pixel and leads to an inaccurate charge interpolation. To study the influence of active edges on the response of edge pixels, we used an advanced X-ray based 3D spatial mapping technique to visually show the charge collection volumes of pixels. Various edgeless detectors with diverse polarities, thicknesses and edge-to-pixel distances were investigated. For the n-on-p (n+/p−/p+) edgeless detector, the mapping shows that the p-spray isolation method has the advantage of achieving a greater sensitive edge region compared to the p-stop method. And the p-on-p (p+/p−/n+) edgeless detector, reported for the first time, functions for both spatial and energy signals. The n-type edgeless detectors were studied together with a standard Medipix detector with the guard ring design. The results show that the edgeless detector is capable of maximally utilizing the edge region of the detector as the charge sensitive volume, while the standard Medipix detector has still vast insensitive region at the edge. The X-ray spectroscopic measurements with 241Am and 55Fe sources performed on all detectors gives a similar conclusion and proves the 3D spatial mapping results.