Deep UV visible blind photoconductive devices can be fabricated on polycrys
talline CVD diamond, a material that is intrinsically radiation hard and vi
sible blind. However, the performance of detectors fabricated on as-grown m
aterial is insufficient to meet the requirements of many laser-based applic
ations, in this paper. it is shown that sequentially applied post-growth tr
eatments can progressively change both the gain and speed of these devices.
Charge sensitive deep level transient spectroscopy (Q-DLTS) and transient
photoconductivity (TPC) has been used to study the effect of these treatmen
ts on the defect structure of our thin film diamond detector material. For
the first time, we report the successful operation of a diamond photoconduc
tive device with linear bias and fluence response characteristics at more t
han 1 kHz at 193 nm.