ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a particular type of detector based on sensitive elements of cadmium zinc telluride (CZT)/cadmium telluride (CdTe), namely, spectrometers with spatial resolution in three dimensions. The charge-collection efficiency is a crucial property of radiation detector, affecting spectroscopic performance, and in particular energy resolution. High charge-collection efficiency ensures good energy resolution, which also depends on the statistics of the charge generation and the noise of the readout electronics. Different methods have been proposed to compensate the trapping effects in CdTe/CZT semiconductor detectors in order to improve their spectroscopic resolution toward its theoretical limit and to increase their full energy efficiency. The most frequently used methods rely on the possibility of avoiding the contribution of holes to the formation of the charge signal, thus using the CZT/CdTe detector as single charge sensing device. The possibility of operating 3-D spectrometers as Compton-scattering detectors gives the appealing opportunity to utilize these devices for measurements of hard x-ray and soft gamma-ray polarimetry.
