Applications of carbon-based diamond detectors: A critical review

Diamond has emerged as the desirable semiconducting material in radiation detectors owing to its extremely wide band gap that favors certain outstanding properties. Such properties include operation under high temperatures, fast response, and solar blindness. In addition, its low atomic number and strong covalent bond make it a near tissue-equivalence and chemically stable respectively. Due to these characteristics, diamond has numerous applications as a radiation detector in high-energy physics, fusion energy, medical physics, and nuclear engineering. In the Millennials, selected high-purity diamonds were mostly used to carry out research. In recent years, microwave plasma-improved chemical vapor deposition (CVD) has enhanced the detector properties of artificial diamonds to achieve high-purity diamonds. Meanwhile, the type of diamond radiation detector that has the optimum features for spectroscopy is single-crystal CVD diamonds. This review summarizes the crucial information about the most recent growth in diamond radiation detectors with the ultimate goal of providing insights into its various applications and potential future research direction.