CVD diamond films have reached in recent years superlative improvements in their “ detector grade “ quality, with a time derivative which was never registered for other similar frontier materials. The basic properties of high quality CVD diamond films make them very interesting for a wide range of radiation detectors : they provide fast signals with very low leakage currents, they are very radiation resistant, they have excellent thermal properties and they can be manufactured as free-standing detectors. The recent availability of single crystal CVD diamond samples of extreme good quality, suitable thickness and surface area has opened new application fields in nuclear detection and dosimetry, such as, for instance, hadron therapy and neutron spectrometry in fusion reactors. At the same time, strip and pixel detectors of unprecedented performances have been successfully realized and exploited in the framework of high energy physics experiments. The paper will review the more recent history of CVD diamond nuclear detectors with respect to material quality, with a particular emphasis on epitaxial single crystals diamond, and the achievements in terms of applications in some different fields.
