Diamond UV detectors for future solar physics missions

Despite their steady improvement over the last decades, the present UV detectors exhibit some limitations inherent to their silicon technology. Yet, the utmost spatial resolution, temporal cadence, sensitivity and photometric accuracy will be decisive for the forthcoming space solar missions. The advent of novel diamond or nitride imagers would surmount many current weaknesses, thus opening up new prospects and making the instruments cheaper. As for projects like the Solar Probe of NASA, or the Solar Orbiter of ESA, the aspiration for diamond UV detectors is still more sensible since these spacecrafts will approach very near to the Sun where the heat and the radiation flues are tremendously high. This triggered the initiative of an original R and T programme entitled BOLD described in this paper. We depict motivations and intentions and report on dedicated experiments with several devices under EUV synchrotron light, NUV laser and micro-Raman spectroscopy. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. Ah rights reserved.