The synchronous detection technique for the accurate monitoring of high-energy pulsed X-rays

At high energy, the smaller inelastic nucleon-Carbon cross-section implies that diamond has a radiation hardness an order of magnitude higher than that of silicon. The production of high-quality diamond crystals and films grown using the chemical vapor deposition technique opened the way for the use of synthetic diamonds in the fabrication of detectors for charged particles and high-energy photons. More recently, laser-processing technology for the fabrication of three-dimensional contacts in diamond has been proposed to produce highly efficient detectors, even with ultra-low active volumes. However, buried-contact structures made with laser treatments unavoidably induce structural defects in the volume surrounding the buried columns, thus affecting the detector response due to trap-related charge transport mechanisms. When pulsed radiation is concerned, experimental results reported in this work demonstrate that synchronous signal conditioning can strongly mitigate the trap-mediated contribution, thereby improving the performance of the overall detection system. Significantly, these results pave the way for the application of diamond samples with three-dimensional buried-contacts in the development of detectors for accurate dosimetry.