Materials and devices for large area solid-state radiation detectors

The need for radiation detectors with high efficiency and wide-area coverage is of high importance in applications such as nuclear medicine, industrial imagining, environmental radioactivity monitoring, spacecraft applications, and homeland security. For these applications, the detector material should be able to strongly interact with high-energy particles, must withstand operation at high electric fields with negligible leakage current, possess high resistivity, and be industrially scalable at low-cost production. In this talk, we demonstrate that low temperature materials and device technologies used for flexible displays and IoT applications can also be used to enable large-area, high-performance and reliable sensing systems for thermal neutrons, rays, X-rays, and ultraviolet radiation. Some of the materials and integration schemes that are discussed include: 1) micro-structured silicon with a 10X higher efficiency (35%) compared with planar detectors (∼3.5%); 2) a method enabling the integration of thin-film diodes with poly-Si CMOS circuits; and 3) the combination of novel deposition techniques such as a solvent-free thin-film deposition, perovskite patterning, and 10B back-fill technique to enable high thermal neutron detection efficiency. We also demonstrate an integrated neutron/ray sensor fully fabricated at UT-Dallas that includes wireless communication to a mobile device.