Silicon Carbide Avalanche Photodiodes for Single-photon Direct Detection of Lyman-alpha Radiation

In the proposed Phase I SBIR program, Aymont Technology and CoolCAD Electronics will design and demonstrate prototype silicon carbide (SiC) avalanche photodiodes (APD) specifically designed for high-efficiency, single-photon counting of 121.6 nm Lyman-alpha photons. This detector will be provided to relevant personnel at NIST for calibration and testing. Both discrete APDs and arrays will be used to enable a 3 x 5 mm detector suitable for this prototype testing. The proposed research will build upon Aymont¿s demonstration of a SiC APD with over one million multiplication gain and CoolCAD¿s extensive modeling of 4H-SiC APDs for 135 nm applications. An absorption layer on the order of 10 nm thick will be used in Phase I to reduce wavelength and enable at least 5% quantum efficiency at the Lyman-alpha characteristic wavelength.