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DEVELOPMENT OF CdZnTe RADIATION DETECTORS

Conference ·
OSTI ID:1029249

Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CdZnTe or CZT) is a very attractive material for room-temperature semiconductor detectors because of its wide band-gap and high atomic number. Despite these advantages, CZT still presents some material limitations and poor hole mobility. In the past decade most of the developing CZT detectors focused on designing different electrode configurations, mainly to minimize the deleterious effect due to the poor hole mobility. A few different electrode geometries were designed and fabricated, such as pixelated anodes and Frisch-grid detectors developed at Brookhaven National Lab (BNL). However, crystal defects in CZT materials still limit the yield of detector-grade crystals, and, in general, dominate the detector's performance. In the past few years, our group's research extended to characterizing the CZT materials at the micro-scale, and to correlating crystal defects with the detector's performance. We built a set of unique tools for this purpose, including infrared (IR) transmission microscopy, X-ray micro-scale mapping using synchrotron light source, X-ray transmission- and reflection-topography, current deep level transient spectroscopy (I-DLTS), and photoluminescence measurements. Our most recent work on CZT detectors was directed towards detailing various crystal defects, studying the internal electrical field, and delineating the effects of thermal annealing on improving the material properties. In this paper, we report our most recent results.

Research Organization:
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) National Synchrotron Light Source
Sponsoring Organization:
DOE - OFFICE OF SCIENCE
DOE Contract Number:
AC02-98CH10886
OSTI ID:
1029249
Report Number(s):
BNL--96183-2011-CP; NN2001000
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English