n-Type cadmium telluride surface barrier nuclear detectors

Abstract
Highly perfect n-type CdTe single crystals grown by the sealed-ingot-zone refining method have been used to fabricate semiconductor surface-barrier detectors for X- and low-energy γ-ray analysis. An energy resolution of 1.7 keV (FWHM) and 1.1 keV (FWHM) was achieved for 59.5 keV γ-rays from 241Am and 5.9 keV characteristic K X-ray line from 55 Fe source, respectively. Preliminary measurements of a temperature dependence of the spectrometric properties of n-type CdTe detectors were also performed. The analysis of the effect of some factors upon spectrometric performance of the detector has been made. Main assumptions of the theoretical model of charge collection efficiency and the shape of the full energy peak for surface-barrier junction with a fixed space charge are presented