Mainz 2012 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne
HK 41: Instrumentation
HK 41.8: Vortrag
Donnerstag, 22. März 2012, 18:45–19:00, P 2
A new silicon drift detector array for low energy proton detection — •Martin Simson1, Marcus Beck2, Heinz Lenk2, Romain Maisonobe1, Adrian Niculae3, Felix Rosenau1, Torsten Soldner1, Heike Soltau3, Alexander Wunderle2, and Oliver Zimmer1 — 1Institut Laue-Langevin, Grenoble, France — 2Institut für Physik, Universität Mainz — 3PN Sensor GmBH, München
The detection of low energy protons is a common problem in fundamental neutron physics. Neutrons decay into an electron, an antineutrino, and a proton. The latter has a rather low energy between 0 and ∼750 eV. On the one hand, this low energy allows to use electric and magnetic fields to guide and analyse the protons with high precision. On the other hand, protons with such low energies cannot be directly detected. In experiments this is typically circumvented by putting the detectors to high voltage to post-accelerate the protons. However, this may lead to problems like penning discharges and even destruction of detectors and read-out electronics by high voltage breakdowns.
Silicon drift detectors (SDDs) are a good choice for the detection of low energy protons. They have superior noise characteristics compared to a conventional semiconductor PIN diode detector and thus allow to reduce the acceleration voltage to about 10 to 15 kV. For both aSPECT (retardation spectrometer for proton spectrum measurement) and HOPE (magnetic trap for neutron lifetime measurement) an array of 3×3 SDDs with an active surface of 900 mm2 has been developed. In the talk the detector array, as well as possible read-out electronics will be presented.