Defects and diffusion in high purity silicon for detector applications

In this contribution we review some recent results on defects occurring after irradiation and thermal treatment of silicon detectors for ionizing radiation. In particular, the annealing of the prominent divacancy centre and the concurrent growth of a new double acceptor centre, assigned to the divacancy–oxygen pair, is treated in detail. The detectors were fabricated using oxygenated high purity float zone (FZ) silicon wafers of n-type in order to improve the radiation hardness. The results obtained have important implication on our current understanding of the degradation of silicon detectors at high radiation fluences and suggest that a new concept for optimised impurity/defect engineering needs to be developed. (© 2004 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)