Silicon carbide (SiC) is a semiconductor with a wide, indirect bandgap. It is one of the hardest materials present in nature. The strong bonds determine a large bandgap, implying a high refractive index and a broad transparency over the visible spectrum. Today, these properties make SiC an ideal material in space applications and for the realization of ultra-lightweight mirrors and bearings.

SiC also has extreme thermal stability, sublimating at 2830 C. Its thermal conductivity is close to the value of copper and is three times higher than Si. Other properties, such as transparency to visible light, ultraviolet (UV) wavelength absorption, radiation hardness and biocompatibility, make this material attractive for alternative application fields, such as high-temperature electronics, biomedical sensors, UV photo-sensors, and charged particle and X-ray detectors.

Silicon carbide shows a large variation in crystal lattices according to the stacking sequence of the atoms in the crystalline lattice. This property is known as “polytypism”, and the stacking sequence causes the presence of both hexagonal and cubic lattice sites. Though SiC exists in more than 200 different polytypes, the 3C, 4H, and 6H structures are the most common and the most popular for microelectronics applications. Each polytype has its own physical properties, such as the energy bandgap, which ranged from 2.36 eV in 3C to 3.23 eV in 4H.

Among all the SiC polytypes, 4H–SiC is considered to be the most appropriate for high-power, high-frequency, and high-temperature applications in microelectronics, as it has the widest bandgap and an almost isotropic electronic mobility.

Its characteristics make it very promising for the next generation of nuclear and particle physics experiments at high beam luminosity. Silicon Carbide detectors for Intense Luminosity Investigations and Applications (SiCILIA) is a project starting as a collaboration between the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) and IMM-CNR, aiming at the realization of innovative detection systems based on SiC.