Irradiation of a Radiation Hard Charge Amplifier for Neutron Diagnostics

Neutron diagnostic systems are essential for nuclear fusion reactors. In these systems, the detector as well as the respective analog amplifier must withstand a high neutron flux, necessitating a thorough understanding of the amplifier’s radiation tolerance and operational lifetime. In this study, CIVIDEC Cx-HiRad low-noise charge-sensitive spectroscopic amplifiers were tested. The amplifiers were exposed to 1-MeV equivalent neutron fluences (<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n_{\text {eq}}$</tex-math> </inline-formula>) ranging from <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2\times 10^{11}$</tex-math> </inline-formula> to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${3\times 10^{16}}~n_{\text {eq}}$</tex-math> </inline-formula>/cm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup>. The 1-MeV equivalent neutron flux for silicon was used, following the nonionizing energy loss (NIEL) scaling hypothesis.