Fabrication and performance of single crystal diamond neutron and gamma ray detectors

Abstract

Two high performance single crystal diamond (SCD) radiation detectors for neutrons and gamma ray have been fabricated. One was coated with a 5 μm 6LiF (95% enriched in 6Li) layer in order to detect the neutrons and the other one is without any conversion layer for comparison. The detectors are irradiated with the 241Am-Be and 252Cf neutron sources and 152Eu gamma source to test their performance. Under neutron sources, the neutron signal peak was clearly observed in the detector with the 6LiF conversion layer. Meanwhile, both detectors are responsive to the gamma rays at the low energy. The 152Eu gamma source was specially used to verify the gamma ray detection ability of the fabricated SCD detectors. The results show that the detector’s count rate and the gamma peak center position in the PHS depend on the incident gamma spectra critically. Combined, these results demonstrate that the design and fabrication process of the detectors are feasible.