Strengthened electric field technique implemented on CZT detectors

This paper presents the development of a simple electrode structure which only requires a simple readout and is suitable for a large cube CZT crystal, such as a 10×10×10 mm3 crystal. A technique named the strengthened electric field (SEF) is investigated in detail and implemented to improve the performance of the detector. Signal processing was also studied to demonstrate its feasibility to further improve the detector's performance. A SEF line anode (SEFLA) prototype and an SEF point anode (SEFPA) prototype were designed, fabricated and tested. Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the SEF technique. The SEFLA detector achieved an energy resolution of 1.6% (FWHM)@662 keV with 4.0 keV noise (FWHM) and SEFPA 1.8% with 5.0 keV noise. Cathode signal is used to do both the rejection and the correction in the SEFLA prototype. At the cost of detection efficiency, the low energy tail is reduced, while the energy resolution and the P/C ratio are further improved. Possible improvements of the detectors are discussed.