Single crystal diamond dosimeters for radiotherapy application

by Dr Gianluca Verona Rinati (Roma 2)

Tuesday 29 May 2012, 15:00 → 16:00 Europe/Rome

N. Cabibbo (INFN-LNL)

Diamond possesses many outstanding properties for radiation detection application. Its high band gap, high radiation tolerance and nearly tissue-equivalence make diamond an ideal candidate for the production of radiotherapy dosimeters. In addition, the sensitivity for unit volume of diamond is much higher than the one of the conventionally used ionization chambers, making possible to realize very small dosimeters with very high spatial resolution. Since several years natural diamonds are used in this field. On the other hand, high quality natural diamonds, showing adequate performance for use in clinical dosimetry are extremely rare and expensive. This drastically limited their large diffusion in radiotherapy. Recently, at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” were developed synthetic single crystal diamond dosimeters in a Schottky diode configuration which show very reproducible and stable performance. The presentation will focus on the fabrication process of such devices, their working principles and their characterization under clinical photon, electron and ion beams.