A novel application of a PIN diode-preamplifier set for the measurement of charged particles

A novel application of a PIN diode-preamplifier set for charged particle spectroscopy applications at the energy range of 4-13 MeV is presented. The low-cost detector-preamplifier set proposed is easy to implement, and can be built with an inexpensive PIN photodiode and a low-noise preamplifier of the charge-sensitive type with a JFET in the front end. This set could substitute for a system with a silicon surface barrier detector in some applications like Rutherford Backscattering Spectroscopy analysis for use in research at experiments of thin targets. The results of the application of the proposed set are compared with those obtained with a surface barrier detector. The results obtained demonstrate the applicability of the system in different counting and spectroscopic particle physics experiments.