Performance of neutron-irradiated 4H-Silicon Carbide diodes subjected to Alpha radiation

TL;DR

This study evaluates the radiation hardness and charge collection efficiency of neutron-irradiated 4H-Silicon Carbide diodes under alpha radiation, demonstrating their potential for high-radiation environments.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed comparison of neutron-irradiated 4H-SiC diode performance under alpha radiation with UV-TCT results, highlighting their radiation tolerance.

Findings

CCE decreases with neutron fluence but improves at higher reverse bias.

High reverse bias can partially recover charge collection efficiency.

Depletion voltage is lower for alpha particles compared to UV-TCT measurements.

Abstract

The unique electrical and material properties of 4H-silicon-carbide (4H-SiC) make it a promising candidate material for high rate particle detectors. In contrast to the ubiquitously used silicon (Si), 4H-SiC offers a higher carrier saturation velocity and larger breakdown voltage, enabling a high intrinsic time resolution and mitigating pile-up effects. Additionally, as radiation hardness requirements grow more demanding, wide-bandgap materials such as 4H-SiC could offer better performance. In this work, the detector performance of 50 micron thick 4H-SiC p-in-n planar pad sensors was investigated at room temperature, using an 241Am alpha source at reverse biases of up to 1100 V. Samples subjected to neutron irradiation with fluences of up to 1e16/cm^2 were included in the study in order to quantify the radiation hardness properties of 4H-SiC. The obtained results are compared to previously performed UV-TCT studies. Samples exhibit a drop in charge collection efficiency (CCE) with increasing irradiation fluence, partially compensated at high reverse bias voltages far above full depletion voltage. A plateau of the collected charges is observed in accordance with the depletion of the volume the alpha particles penetrate for an unirradiated reference detector. For the neutron-irradiated samples, such a plateau only becomes apparent at higher reverse bias. For the highest investigated fluence, CCE behaves almost linearly with increasing reverse bias. Compared to UV-TCT measurements, the reverse bias required to deplete a sensitive volume covering full energy deposition is lower, due to the small penetration depth of the alpha particles. At the highest reverse bias, the measured CCE values agree well with earlier UV-TCT studies, with discrepancies between 1% and 5%.