Review of the development of diamond radiation sensors

Diamond radiation sensors produced by chemical vapour deposition are studied for the application as tracking detectors in high luminosity experiments. Sensors with a charge collection distance up to 250 mu m have been manufactured. Their radiation hardness has been studied with pions, proton and neutrons up to fluences of 1.9 x 10(15) pi cm(-2), 5 x 10(15) p cm(-2) and 1.35 x 10(15) n cm(-2), respectively. Diamond micro-strip detectors with 50 mu m pitch have been exposed in a high-energy test beam in order to investigate their charge collection properties. The measured spatial resolution using a centre-of-gravity position finding algorithm corresponds to the digital resolution for this strip pitch. First results from a strip tracker with a 2 x 4 cm(2) surface area are reported as well as the performance of a diamond tracker read out by radiation-hard electronics with 25 ns shaping time. Diamond pixel sensors have been prepared to match the geometries of the recently available read-out chip prototypes for ATLAS and CMS. Beam test results an shown from a diamond detector bump-bonded to an ATLAS prototype read-out. They demonstrate a 98% bump-bonding efficiency and a digital resolution in both dimensions. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.