Drift time variations in CdZnTe detectors measured with alpha-particles: Their correlation with the detector’s responses

Homogeneity of properties related to material crystallinity is a critical parameter for achieving high-performance CdZnTe (CZT) radiation detectors. Unfortunately, this requirement is not always satisfied in today's commercial CZT material due to high concentrations of extended defects, in particular subgrain boundaries, which are believed to be part of the causes hampering the energy resolution and efficiency of CZT detectors. In the past, the effects of subgrain boundaries have been studied in Si, Ge and other semiconductors. It was demonstrated that subgrain boundaries tend to accumulate secondary phases and impurities causing inhomogeneous distributions of trapping centers. It was also demonstrated that subgrain boundaries result in local perturbations of the electric field, which affect the carrier transport and other properties of semiconductor devices. The subgrain boundaries in CZT material likely behave in a similar way, which makes them responsible for variations in the electron drift time and carrier trapping in CZT detectors. In this work, we employed the transient current technique to measure variations in the electron drift time and related the variations to the device performances and subgrain boundaries, whose presence in the crystals were confirmed with white beam X-ray diffraction topography and infrared transmission microscopy.