Investigations of Diamond Detectors for Particle Identification

With advancements to the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) technique, manufacturers are now able to produce single crystal diamonds with lower impurities than in the past. The diamonds made using CVD have been implemented as charged-particle detectors and have been shown to have good energy resolution, fast response time, and higher radiation hardness than silicon detectors. Because of these characteristics, diamond detectors may be used for accurate particle identification, with the potential to perform well in high energy experiments. Work presented includes data from both a diamond telescope detector and silicon telescope detector. The detectors were placed at the end of the Momentum Achromat Recoil Spectrometer (MARS) beamline at the Texas A\&M Cyclotron Institute. Using a 35 Mev/u ⁷⁸Kr beam produced by the K500 superconducting cyclotron on Be and Ni targets, a direct comparison of the data from the silicon detector and the diamond detector was performed. While particle identification was possible using a ∆E - E diamond telescope, it was also observed that diamond detectors suffer from saturation and significant pulse height defects.