In situ radiation test of silicon and diamond detectors operating in superfluid helium and developed for beam loss monitoring

As a result of the foreseen increase in the luminosity of the Large Hadron Collider, the discrimination between the collision products and possible magnet quench-provoking beam losses of the primary proton beams is becoming more critical for safe accelerator operation. We report the results of ongoing research efforts targeting the upgrading of the monitoring system by exploiting Beam Loss Monitor detectors based on semiconductors located as close as possible to the superconducting coils of the triplet magnets. In practice, this means that the detectors will have to be immersed in superfluid helium inside the cold mass and operate at 1.9 K. Additionally, the monitoring system is expected to survive 20 years of LHC operation, resulting in an estimated radiation fluence of 1×10¹⁶ proton/cm², which corresponds to a dose of about 2 MGy. In this study, we monitored the signal degradation during the in situ irradiation when silicon and single-crystal diamond detectors were situated in the liquid/superfluid helium and the dependences of the collected charge on fluence and bias voltage were obtained. It is shown that diamond and silicon detectors can operate at 1.9 K after 1×10¹⁶ p/cm² irradiation required for application as BLMs, while the rate of the signal degradation was larger in silicon detectors than in the diamond ones. For Si detectors this rate was controlled mainly by the operational mode, being larger at forward bias voltage.