A major difficulty in characterizing vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) radiation produced by harmonic generation or four-wave sum frequency mixing arises in differentiating between the desired VUV signal and the remaining fundamental pump laser beam. To overcome this problem, visible and near UV blind VUV detectors, made from natural and synthetic diamond, have been developed. Such detectors have been used to characterize coherent VUV pulses (λ=125 nm, pulse duration at full width half maximum (FWHM) τFWHM∼7 ns) generated by resonance-enhanced four-wave sum mixing in mercury vapor. They allow full characterization of the intensity profile of the VUV pulses, without any significant parasitic signal from simultaneous stray light irradiation at λ=313 nm. Detectors were fabricated exhibiting response times of less than 70 ps at FWHM, corresponding to the lowest response time obtainable with a 7 GHz bandwidth single-shot oscilloscope.
CVD diamond is a remarkable material for the fabrication of particle and photon radiation detectors. The improvement of the electronic properties of the material has been under intensive investigations and led to the development of a few applications that are addressing specific industrial needs. In particular, we have used diamond layers for industrial applications where it exhibits attractive characteristics as compared with other materials: e.g., radiation and corrosion hardness for a-counters or high gamma-meters at high fluxes; high transparency to low energy X-rays for synchrotron beam line monitoring devices, etc. These specific properties can motivate the use of diamond even though the detection properties remain relatively poor. Indeed, one inherent problem with diamond is the presence of defect levels that are altering the detection characteristics. These are observed in all CVD materials but also in very high quality natural diamonds. They result in unstable responses and carrier losses. Also, it has been observed that high sensitivities may result from the progressive filling of deep levels, e.g. pumping effects, with a detrimental effect on the stability and the response time. Also, the polycrystalline nature is somewhat detrimental as it induces significant non-uniformities of the device response with respect to the position of interaction. We have investigated these features by imaging the response of CVD diamond using a micrometer size focused X-ray beam. The comparison with the grain structure showed that it has a strong influence on the field distribution. We present here recent developments studied at CEA in Saclay for the optimisation of the material with respect to the specific requirements of several applications. They include radiation hard counters; X-ray intensity, shape and beam position monitors, solar blind photodetectors, and high dose rate gamma-meters.
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