Natural diamond detector as a high energy particle spectrometer

Natural Diamond Detectors (NDD) were developed in Russia and have been used for deuterium-tritium (DT) neutron, and energetic particles spectrometry in high power tokamak experiments. An NDD is a metal-insulator-metal structure, with Au, Ti-Mo-Au or Ti-Pt-Au as metal and a very pure natural diamond as insulator. High band gap, resistivity and breakdown resistance, large saturation velocity and mean free drift time (10-15 ns) are crucial for materials used in radiation detectors. Application of NDDs to spectrometry purposes is based on big (up to few mm) charge collection distance of selected natural diamonds. The energy resolution of our best detectors was in the range 1.5-3%. Such high resolution coupled with high radiation resistance of diamonds (5*10/sup 14/ n/cm/sup 2/) provided their successful application to 14 MeV neutron spectrometry and flux monitoring in experiments on SNEG-13, FNG, FNS neutron generators, TFTR and JT-60U tokamaks. The possibility of it's operation at extremely high temperatures makes the NDD ideal means for neutron and high energy particles spectrometry in future burning plasma and other high energy physics experiments.