Initial results of a silicon sensor irradiation study for ILC extreme forward calorimetry

Detectors proposed for the International Linear Collider (ILC) incorporate a tungsten sampling calorimeter ('BeamCal') intended to reconstruct showers of electrons, positrons and photons that emerge from the interaction point of the collider with angles between 5 and 50 milliradians. For the innermost radius of this calorimeter, radiation doses at shower-max are expected to reach 100 MRad per year, primarily due to minimum-ionizing electrons and positrons that arise in the induced electromagnetic showers of e+e− 'beamstrahlung' pairs produced in the ILC beam-beam interaction. However, radiation damage to calorimeter sensors may be dominated by hadrons induced by nuclear interactions of shower photons, which are much more likely to contribute to the non-ionizing energy loss that has been observed to damage sensors exposed to hadronic radiation. We report here on the results of SLAC Experiment T-506, for which several different types of silicon diode sensors were exposed to doses of radiation induced by showering electrons of energy 3.5-10.6 GeV. By embedding the sensor under irradiation within a tungsten radiator, the exposure incorporated hadronic species that would potentially contribute to the degradation of a sensor mounted in a precision sampling calorimeter. Depending on sensor technology, efficient charge collection was observed for doses as large as 220 MRad.