Industry & transport

CZT; high resolution spectroscopy at room temperature

CZT (Cadmium Zink Telluride) is a room temperature semiconductor that directly converts x-ray or gamma-ray photons into electrons. CZT is a unique semiconductor compared with other scintillator detectors, in that CZT operates at room temperature and can process >10 million photons /second/mm². Additionally, CZT’s spectroscopic resolution (2%) clearly out performs any commercially available scintillator detector on price/quality.

How does it work?

CZT detectors are fabricated with very thin metalized electrode geometries deposited on the detector surfaces. These electrodes are then electrically biased creating a difference in electrical potential within the detector volume. When ionizing radiation interacts with the CZT crystal, electron hole pairs are created in proportion to the energy of the incoming radiation.The negatively charged electrons and positively charged holes then migrate to the oppositely charged electrode where they are collected. The resulting charge pulse is then detected by the preamplifier, which produces a voltage pulse whose height is proportional to the incident energy of the incoming photon. The signal from the preamplifier is then fed into a shaping amplifier that converts the signal into a Gaussian pulse and amplifies it. The signal can then be fed into a standard counting system or Multi Channel Analyzer (MCA) to generate the characteristic spectrum for the incoming photons.