Effectiveness of electrostatic shielding and electronic subtraction to correct for the hole trapping in CdZnTe semiconductor detectors

摘要

CdZnTe (CZT) is a very promising material for nuclear-radiation detectors. CZT detectors operate at ambient temperatures and offer high detection efficiency and excellent energy resolution, placing them ahead of high-purity Ge for those applications where cryogenic cooling is problematic. The progress achieved in CZT detectors over the past decade is founded on the developments of robust detector designs and readout electronics, both of which helped to overcome the effects of carrier trapping. Because the holes have low mobility, only electrons can be used to generate signals in thick CZT detectors, so one must account for the variation of the output signal versus the locations of the interaction points. To obtain high spectral resolution, the detector's design should provide a means to eliminate this dependence throughout the entire volume of the device, In reality, the sensitive volume of any ionization detector invariably has two regions. In the first, adjacent to the collecting electrode, the amplitude of the output signal rapidly increases almost to its maximum as the interaction point is located farther from the anode; in the rest of the volume, the output signal remains nearly constant. Thus, the quality of CZT detector designs can be characterized based on the magnitude of the signals variations in the drift region and the ratio between the volumes of the drift and induction regions. The former determines the "geometrical" width of the photopeak, i.e., the line width that affects the total energy resolution and is attributed to the device's geometry when all other factors are neglected. The latter determines the photopeak efficiency and the area under the continuum in the pulse-height spectra. In this work, we describe our findings from systematizing different designs of CZT detectors and evaluating their performance based on these two criteria.