  In ion cancer therapy, high-intensity ion beams are used to treat tumors by
taking advantage of the Bragg-Peak. Typical ion therapy centers use particle
rates up to $10^{10}$ ions/second for treatment. On the other hand, such
intensities are often too high when using these beamlines for particle physics
experiments or as a test-beam environment in general. The project presented
here aims to develop a beam position and intensity monitor, to cover a wide
intensity range from a few Hz up to GHz rates, as used in clinical settings.
Silicon carbide (SiC) is an attractive detector material for this application
because it combines potential high radiation hardness with high thermal
conductivity to avoid cooling. Moreover, its high electron saturation velocity
allows very fast signals to mitigate pile-ups. However, some special properties
of the material like different crystal polytypes have to be considered. In this
paper, measurements on both a pad and a micro-strip SiC sensor prototype of 4H
lattice geometry are shown. The sensors were tested in the laboratory using
radioactive sources and with a proton beam in a wide intensity range (kHz-GHz)
and with different energies (60-800 MeV) available at MedAustron, an ion cancer
therapy center located in Austria. The measurements show that MIP particles
cannot be detected reliably with the used discrete electronics setup in
combination with the single-channel sensor. However, the strip sensor combined
with an ASIC-based readout electronics from the CMS/Belle-II experiments allows
to recover a certain part of the signal. This makes it possible to determine
the ionization energy and average number of electron/hole pairs generated in
the studied sensor samples.
