High speed diamond photoconductive devices for UV detection

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.