Diamond Detectors for Ionizing Radiation - HEPHY

Chapter 1
Synopsis
Diamonds are a girl's best friend.
M. Monroe
In fact, diamonds are more than that. Widely known for its hardness, industrial
diamond has been successfully applied to drilling and cutting tools all over the world.
However, articially grown diamond can also serve for particle detection, similar to semiconductors
such as silicon or germanium. Due to its expected radiation hardness, diamond
is a candidate for future high energy experiments.
The RD42 collaboration at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics, Geneva,
CH) has been installed in 1994 to develop diamond detectors and readout electronics for
the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is planned to start running in
2005. The projected features of this machine will exceed the limits of present technology
in many elds. In the past years, several institutes joined the RD42 collaboration, which
has now approximately 80 scientic members from 24 institutes all over the world.
In 1995, I began to work with the HEPHY [1] (Insitute of High Energy Physics, Vienna,
A) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Soon I got in touch with diamond detectors
and became a member of the RD42 collaboration. In 1995, we built a characterization
station for solid state detector samples, especially diamonds. It took quite a lot of time
to understand and optimize the device, as we developed almost everything from scratch,
from the mechanical support to the software. I laid special emphasis on achieving the
lowest noise possible in the design of this characterization station. In the autumns of
1995, 1996 and 1997, we performed three irradiation experiments in a pion beam at
the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI, Villigen, CH). Because of my essential contribution to
preparation, realization and data analysis, ample space is devoted to these projects within
this thesis. Also numeric calculation of electric elds was included in my further analysis.
A summary of my personal \diamond career" is given in appendix B.
This thesis is divided into several chapters, each of which deals with a certain aspect
of diamond detectors. A general introduction and the motivation for diamond detector
research is given in chapter 2. The growth and properties of diamond are described in
chapter 3, while chapter 4 gives a brief overview of the theoretical background of particle
detection. Under this aspect, diamond is compared to other solid state detector materials,
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