Synthetic diamond supplied by Element Six will play a part in research into the evolution of the universe being carried out by the world-renowned Institute for Heavy Ion Research, Gesellschaft f¨¹r Schwerionenforschung (GSI).

Diamond-based detectors are being incorporated into the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research, FAIR, a 1.2 billion euros project planned to be operational by 2012. FAIR is hoped to gain insights into some of the fundamental questions about the universe¡¯s evolution, the origin and the abundance of the elements,

Sophisticated advanced detector technology combined with powerful data processing is needed to gather and interpret the experimental data from a large number of different experiments. A broad range of diamond detectors are already at work within GSI¡¯s current accelerator facility, but when FAIR comes into operation, more applications will need to use radiation-hard materials for a variety of sensing and detection applications. FAIR will offer increased beam intensities up to a factor of 10,000 and an increase in beam energies by a factor of 20.

Element Six supplies much of this material and GSI also works closely with Diamond Detectors Ltd, an Element Six Ventures portfolio company, set up to design detectors based on synthetic diamond material.

The main role of diamond as detectors lies mainly in those applications where classical detector devices fail. Detectors have to be radiation hard and ultra fast, placed directly in heavy-ion beams of intensities of >1010 ions/spill with spills having durations from 0.5s to 10s. The most common applications where diamond is needed are timing applications. Generally this relates to any kind of beam-/bunch monitoring, beam-profile- and time-structure analysis, and to time-of-flight measurements as well.

Source: E6