pin photo diode detection

[luuk]

Just for the fun of it I took an old bare Hamamatsu S1337-1010BR pin photo diode and did some test with three different sources, without a scintillation crystal.
The thickness of the diode is only 0.3mm so efficiency is very low but still there is something to detect, sources were in direct contact with the diode surface.
Measuring time a 1-3 minutes.



Luuk

[stamasd]

Interesting. I've been toying with the idea of trying some PIN photodiodes as detectors. Just lacking the time.
I've seen some papers online, not too many. Seems that these are reasonable to use only below 100keV or so, because of the small detector volume thus don't have enough stopping power for higher energy photons. But below that, especially the bigger photodiodes can make reasonable detectors if the signal amplifier is very carefully constructed. In one such paper they achieved a resolution of about 1.5keV for the americium peak. Maybe decent for XRF?

[luuk]

Hello Silviu,

I don’t think that it is possible to use a bare diode as detector for xrf , the efficiency of the diode is to small and if you want to do xrf the counter rate of the signal is very low therefore you will use an extreme long time to get an result then you will have stability problems.
Because diodes are very temperature depended, also it will be nearly impossible to get a good resolution on these low energies.
So in my opinion it will not work.
Luuk

[stamasd]

Thanks. It's always good to hear from experts, avoiding thus to waste one's time. :)