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.