Diamond is a promising material for the production of semitransparent in situ photon beam monitors which can withstand the high dose rates occurring in new generation synchrotron radiation storage rings and in free electron lasers. We report on the development of a 500 μm thick freestanding, single crystal chemical vapor deposited diamond detector with segmented electrodes. Performances in both low and radio frequency beam monitoring are presented as well. By using charge integration techniques at a frame rate of 6.5 kHz in combination with a needle synchrotron radiation beam and mesh scans, the inhomogeneity of the sensor was found to be of the order of 2%; with a measured electronics noise of 2 pA / √Hz a 0.05% relative precision in the intensity measurements (at 1 μA) and a 0.1 μm resolution in the position encoding have been estimated. Moreover, the high electron–hole mobility of diamond compared with other active materials enables very fast charge collection characterized by rise-times below 1 ns; this allowed us to utilize single pulse integration to simultaneously detect the intensity and the position of each synchrotron radiation photon bunch generated by a bending magnet.
