Professor Peter Hobson presented a poster at the Vienna Conference on Instrumentation in February 2019, on work on CVD diamond sensors optimised for high temperature applications.
Radiation monitoring near nuclear reactors and in deep oil and gas borehole logging requires sensors capable of operating at temperatures in excess of 200 C. Professor Peter Hobson presented a poster at the Vienna Conference on Instrumentation in February 2019, on work carried out with colleagues at Brunel University London on CVD diamond sensors optimised for high temperature applications. A number of nominally identical sensors were evaluated and it was demonstrated that alpha particle energy resolutions between 1.6% and 4.0%, with charge collection efficiency exceeding 96%, were obtained up to temperatures of 225 C. A significant degredation in performance at higher tmperatures was attributed to a sharp increase in thermally induced trapping–detrapping. A micropatterned sensor, produced by plasma etching, was modelled using FLUKA to show the potential for enhanced neutron detection efficiency with the surface pits filled with boron-10. Detailed results can be found in a recent Open Access publication in Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A at this DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nima.2019.162486