Solid-State Charpak Detector with Unipolar and Ultrafast Time-Differential Pulse Response

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel high granularity solid-state detector with unipolar, ultrafast pulse response, achieving a 400-fold speed increase and reaching the physical limit of detector speed, with broad applications in various scientific fields.

Contribution

The paper presents the first fabrication of a micropattern solid-state detector with unipolar, time-differential response, significantly enhancing pulse speed and performance.

Findings

Achieved a ~400x speed improvement in detector response.

Demonstrated transition to the physical limit of detector speed.

Enabled potential applications in diverse scientific and industrial fields.

Abstract

For the first time we have fabricated a high granularity micropattern solid-state detector (MSSD) with the unipolar time-differential property for ultrafast pulse response. Optical, x-ray, and gamma-ray photoconductivity measurements prove the unipolar time-differential response with a speed improvement factor of ~400 for amorphous selenium MSSD. The significance of the results presented here is the ability to reach the intrinsic physical limit for detector pulse speed by transitioning from the transit-time-limited response, which depends on the bulk carrier transport mechanism, to range-limited response set by the spatial dispersion of the photo-induced carrier cloud. Furthermore, the combination of the time-differential and the avalanche-multiplication properties of the proposed micropattern solid-state detector can yield another great leap forward in the field of radiation detectors with applications ranging from high-energy, nuclear, and astro- physics, to industrial and medical diagnostics, and crystallography.