Massive silicon or germanium detectors at cryogenic temperature

Several massive silicon and germanium home-made detectors, working at cryogenic temperature, have been studied. They are the benchmarking schemes to check the possibility of realizing a semiconductor time projection chamber that could have various interesting applications in weak interaction problems. Reported here are the first results on investigations of charge collection efficiency and metal-semiconductor contact hardness. The leakage current, total depletion voltage and alpha or gamma spectroscopy are presented. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.