ABSTRACT

The development of cadmium zinc telluride (CZT)/cadmium telluride (CdTe) spectrometers with high 2D/3D spatial resolution and fine spectroscopy represents a challenge to the realization of a new class of high-performance instruments, for hard x/γ-rays, able to fulfill the current and future requirements in several applications fields. This chapter is divided into two main parts. The first part, gives a summary of room-temperature semiconductor principle and CZT/CdTe development for the realization of detectors for x- and γ-rays suitable for building two- and three-dimensional spectroscopic imagers. The second part addresses the use of CdTe/CZT spectroscopic imagers as scattering polarimeters for high-energy astrophysics applications and is mainly based on the results obtained by the authors and colleagues both by experiments and by Monte Carlo simulations. To optimize the polarimetric performances of future high-energy space proposals, a series of experiments based on CZT/CdTe pixel detector prototypes were carried out at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), where a ~99" polarized gamma-ray beam is available.