High Current Silicon Carbide Diodes as Dose Detectors for Hard X-Rays

The small community of physicists concerned with flash x-rays, short pulses of intense hard bremsstrahlung with photon energies exceeding hundreds of keV, is always on the lookout for new detector materials and protocols to diagnose such radiation pulses. Important parameters for the detector include rise time, sensitivity, size and cost. Silicon carbide has many of the right material properties for such a detector. In the exploratory test reported here, a high voltage SiC diode performe quite well, which suggests that success can be expected from a more extensive program that would find out what SiC is capable of in this application.