A study of the radiation tolerance of poly-crystalline and single-crystalline CVD diamond to 800 MeV and 24 GeV protons

We have measured the radiation tolerance of poly-crystalline and single-crystalline diamonds grown by the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process by measuring the charge collected before and after irradiation in a 50 μm pitch strip detector fabricated on each diamond sample. We irradiated one group of sensors with 800 MeV protons, and a second group of sensors with 24 GeV protons, in steps, to (1.34 ± 0.08 × 10$^{16}$) protons cm$^{-2}$ and (1.80 ± 0.18 × 10$^{16}$) protons cm$^{-2}$ respectively. We observe the sum of mean drift paths for electrons and holes for both poly-crystalline CVD diamond and single-crystalline CVD diamond decreases with irradiation fluence from its initial value according to a simple damage curve characterized by a damage constant for each irradiation energy and the irradiation fluence. We find for each irradiation energy the damage constant, for poly-crystalline CVD diamond to be the same within statistical errors as the damage constant for single-crystalline CVD diamond. We find the damage constant for diamond irradiated with 24 GeV protons to be 0.62$^{+0.01}$$_{−0.01}$ (stat) $^{+0.06}$$_{−0.06}$ (syst) × 10$^{-18}$ cm$^{2}$ (p μm) $^{-1}$ and the damage constant for diamond irradiated with 800 MeV protons to be 1.04$^{+0.02}$$_{−0.02}$ (stat) $^{+0.04}$$_{−0.05}$ (syst) × 10$^{-18}$ cm$^{2}$ (p μm) $^{-1}$. Moreover, we observe the FWHM/MP pulse height decreases with fluence for poly-crystalline CVD material and within statistical errors does not change with fluence for single-crystalline CVD material for both 24 GeV proton irradiation and 800 MeV proton irradiation. Finally, we have measured the uniformity of each sample as a function of fluence and observed that for poly-crystalline CVD diamond the samples become more uniform with fluence while for single-crystalline CVD diamond the uniformity does not change with fluence.