Effect of extreme radiation fluences on parameters of SiC nuclear particle detectors

Abstract

Detectors based on modern CVD-grown films were irradiated with 8 MeV protons at a fluence of 3 × 10¹⁴ cm⁻². The concentration of primary radiation defects was ∼10¹⁷ cm⁻³, which is three orders of magnitude higher than the concentration of the initially present uncompensated donors. The resulting deep compensation of SiC enabled measurements of detector parameters in two modes: under reverse and forward bias. The basic parameters of the detectors degraded by no more than a factor of 1.7, compared with the fluence of 1 × 10¹⁴ cm⁻². However, there appeared a polarization voltage, which indicates that a space charge is accumulated by radiation defects.