Surface Barrier Structures with Various Metal Electrodes

This paper describes the results of studies intended to provide a detailed understanding of the physical phenomena associated with dead layers sufficient to permit the production of rugged, reliable, ultrathin window detectors suitable for use in experiments which require the detection of very low energy radiation and also for the detection of heavily ionizing radiation, such as fission fragments. The properties of contacts formed by several different metals have been investigated. Interesting phenomena were observed when using nickel and chromium as the rectifying contact. The thinnest dead layers obtained so far are 270 Ã… for gold, 280 Ã… for aluminum, and 190 Ã… for palladium, in terms of silicon-equivalence.