*Article* **Silicon Carbide Microstrip Radiation Detectors**

#### **Donatella Puglisi 1,2,\* and Giuseppe Bertuccio 1,3**


Received: 17 July 2019; Accepted: 27 November 2019; Published: 30 November 2019

**Abstract:** Compared with the most commonly used silicon and germanium, which need to work at cryogenic or low temperatures to decrease their noise levels, wide-bandgap compound semiconductors such as silicon carbide allow the operation of radiation detectors at room temperature, with high performance, and without the use of any bulky and expensive cooling equipment. In this work, we investigated the electrical and spectroscopic performance of an innovative position-sensitive semiconductor radiation detector in epitaxial 4H-SiC. The full depletion of the epitaxial layer (124 μm, 5.2 × 10<sup>13</sup> cm<sup>−</sup>3) was reached by biasing the detector up to 600 V. For comparison, two di fferent microstrip detectors were fully characterized from −20 ◦C to +107 ◦C. The obtained results show that our prototype detector is suitable for high resolution X-ray spectroscopy with imaging capability in a wide range of operating temperatures.

**Keywords:** silicon carbide; semiconductor radiation detector; microstrip detector
