Year
2010
Abstract
Solid state thermal neutron detectors are desired to replace the current He tube based technology, which has some issues with stability, sensitivity to microphonics and very recently a shortage in 3He. There have been several solid state thermal neutron detector concepts developed recently. Our approach is based on the combination of high aspect ratio silicon PIN diodes surrounded by 10B, the neutron converter material. Etching high aspect ratio pillar structures into silicon produces a device that can efficiently absorb the thermal neutrons because of a large volume of 10B within the pillar array. The charged particles generated by the thermal neutron - 10 B reaction are detected in the PIN diodes by spacing the pillars to optimize reaction product collection efficiency. In this paper, preliminary results indicate that our device can withstand a certain amount of neutron and gamma fluence without deterioration of detector’s performance.