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- Bertuccio, Giuseppe, et al.
(author)
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Silicon Carbide X-Ray Detectors Operating at Room and High Temperature
- 2014
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Silicon Carbide (SiC) is a wide bandgap semiconductor with attractive physical properties for manufacturing X-ray detectors [1]. The density of SiC crystal allow an X‑ray absorption similar to Silicon. The wide bandgap of SiC (3.2 eV) allows to make high Schottky barriers and minimises the reverse current from thermal generation of charge carriers. The SiC breakdown field (2 MV/cm) and the high saturation velocities of the charge carriers (200 mm/ns) make the detector response very fast and not affected by charge trapping degradation.In this talk, we present the SiC X-ray detectors we have developed. The detectors show leakage current densities as low as J=0.1 pA/cm2 at +25°C, three orders of magnitude lower than those of the best silicon detectors and make SiC detectors practically noiseless at room temperature. The detectors have been tested also at high temperatures: at T=+100°C the J= 1 nA/cm2, allowing excellent X-ray spectrometry even at such high temperatures, forbidden to conventional semiconductor detectors. In addition we will show that our SiC detectors can also operate while the temperature is freely changing of tens of °C, without affecting spectra quality.The possibility to make the detector operating without any cooling system even at high temperature with adequate energy resolution can open new perspectives in X‑ray spectrometry applications, even ever considered before.
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