Cadmium zinc telluride

A direct bandgap semiconductor, it is used in a variety of applications, including semiconductor radiation detectors, photorefractive gratings, electro-optic modulators, solar cells, and terahertz generation and detection.

[1] Radiation detectors using CZT can operate in direct-conversion (or photoconductive) mode at room temperature, unlike some other materials (particularly germanium) which require cooling.

Their relative advantages include high sensitivity for X-rays and gamma rays, due to the high atomic numbers of Cd and Te, and better energy resolution than scintillator detectors.

[2] CZT can be formed into different shapes for different radiation-detecting applications, and a variety of electrode geometries, such as coplanar grids [3] and small pixel detectors,[4] have been developed to provide unipolar (electron-only) operation, thereby improving energy resolution.

[5] Pixelated CZT with a volume of 6 cm3 can achieve 0.71% FWHM energy resolution at 662 keV and perform Compton imaging.

A YanDavos radiation sensor system based on a 1 cm 3 CZT crystal, deployed on a Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped robot for radiation mapping in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
A Cs-137 gamma-ray spectrum collected using an M400 pixelated CZT imaging spectrometer. Energy resolution, as measured by full-width-at-half-maximum (FWHM), is better than 1%.