Characterization of a Single Crystal Diamond Pixel Detector in a High Energy Particle Beam

TL;DR

This paper presents the first characterization of a single-crystal diamond pixel detector in a high-energy particle beam, demonstrating excellent charge collection, high efficiency, and precise spatial resolution suitable for harsh radiation environments.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed performance evaluation of a single-crystal diamond pixel detector in a 100 GeV beam, highlighting its potential for advanced particle detection applications.

Findings

Charge collection is full across the detector volume.

Signal charge distributions are narrow with S/N > 100.

Detection efficiency is approximately 99.9%.

Abstract

Diamond has been developed as a material for the detection of charged particles by ionization. Its radiation hardness makes it an attractive material for detectors operated in a harsh radiation environment e.g. close to a particle beam as is the case for beam monitoring and for pixel vertex detectors. Poly-crystalline chemical vapor deposition (CVD) diamond has been studied as strip and pixel detectors so far. We report on a first-time characterization of a single-crystal diamond pixel detector in a 100 GeV particle beam at CERN. The detectors are made from irregularly shaped single crystal sensors, 395mm thick, mated by bump bonding to a front-end readout IC as used in the ATLAS pixel detector with pixel sizes of 50 x 400 mm2. The diamond sensors show excellent charge collection properties: full collection over the entire detector volume, clean and narrow signal charge distributions with a S/N value of >100 and a hit detection efficiency of (99.9 +- 0.1)%. The measured spatial resolution for particles under normal incidence in the shorter pixel direction is (8.9 +- 0.1) um.