The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN) will detect tritium beta- decay electrons that pass through its electromagnetic spectrometer with a highly- segmented monolithic silicon pin-diode focal-plane detector (FPD). This pin-diode array will be on a single piece of 500-{\mu}m-thick silicon, with contact between titanium nitride (TiN) coated detector pixels and front-end electronics made by spring-loaded pogo pins. The pogo pins will exert a total force of up to 50N on the detector, deforming it and resulting in mechanical stress up to 50 MPa in the silicon bulk. We have evaluated a prototype pin-diode array with a pogo-pin connection scheme similar to the KATRIN FPD. We find that pogo pins make good electrical contact to TiN and observe no effects on detector resolution or reverse-bias leakage current which can be attributed to mechanical stress.
@article{arxiv.1202.0320,
title = {Performance of a TiN-coated monolithic silicon pin-diode array under mechanical stress},
author = {B. A. VanDevender and L. I. Bodine and A. W. Myers and J. F. Amsbaugh and M. A. Howe and M. L. Leber and R. G. H. Robertson and K. Tolich and T. D. Van Wechel and B. L. Wall},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1202.0320},
year = {2012}
}