The purpose of this work was to study the radiation hardness of particle detectors. Silicon detectors are cost-effective and have an excellent spatial resolution. Therefore, they are widely used in many high-energy physics experiments. It is known that oxygen improves the radiation hardness of silicon detectors. The natural way to have a high concentration of oxygen in silicon is to use magnetic Czochralski silicon (MCz-Si). MCz-Si has intrinsically a relatively uniform and high level of oxygen (5×1017 cm³) compared to regular float-zone silicon (FZ-Si). Such a level is hard to attain with other methods, namely the diffusion oxygenation of float-zone silicon.
In the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its potential upgrade, the luminosity and the fluencies of fast hadrons can be so high that detectors made of standard detector-grade FZ-Si might not survive the planned operating period. MCz-Si offers an improvement to the lifetime of particle detectors through improved radiation hardness.
This thesis takes a process-oriented view of the potential of the MCz-Si material. The processing of radiation detectors on MCz-Si is described, the process is characterized from the process point of view, and the radiation hardness is studied after irradiations. There is also an emphasis on the intentional introduction of thermal donors (TDs) in high-resistivity MCz-Si material, and specifically on their potential in p-type MCz-Si detectors
