IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 52, NO.
3, JUNE 2005
Factors Limiting the Performance
of CdZnTe Detectors
A. E. Bolotnikov, Member, IEEE, G. C. Camarda, G. W. Wright, and R. B. James, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—In the past few years, significant progress has been
achieved in the development of room-temperature semiconductor
detectors, particularly those based on CdZnTe (CZT) crystals.
Several types of electron-transport-only detectors have been de-
veloped: pixel, coplanar-grid, cross-strip, drift-strip, orthogonal
coplanar strip, and virtual Frisch grid, many of which are now
commercially available. Despite all these varieties in the detector
designs, they have many common features and problems. This
review summarizes the common detector design constraints and
related factors limiting performance of CZT detectors: bulk and
surface leakage currents, surface effects, properties of Schottky
contacts and surface interfacial layers, charge sharing and loss
in multielectrode devices, charge transport nonuniformities, and
fluctuations in the pulse height for long-drift-length devices. We
also describe unique capabilities at Brookhaven National Labo-
ratory, Upton, NY, for CZT device characterization and recent
progress utilizing these tools.
Index Terms—CdZnTe (CZT), gamma-ray detectors, semicon-
ductor radiation detectors.
I. INTRODUCTION
S EMI-INSULATING CdZnTe (CZT) has been introduced
to overcome the problems associated with high-purity Ge
(HPGe) (requires cooling) and Si(Li) (low stopping power) with
potential spectroscopic performance that approaches HPGe and
Si(Li) radiation detectors [1].
CZT detectors have higher stopping power and operate at
room temperature, but their active volume and spectral response
are still behind Ge detectors. The primary problem lies in phys-
ical and electronic properties of currently available CZT crys-
tals. The maximum crystal size and quality of HPGe are still
superior over CZT. The sensitive volume of HPGe detectors is
typically of hundreds of cm . The volume of good quality CZT
crystals is limited to a few cm . CZT is comparably “slow” ma-
terial: electron and hole drift mobilities in CZT are and
cm /Vs, respectively, while the same parameters in HPGe
are 3900 and 1900 cm /Vs. Correspondingly, -products are
cm /V (electrons) and cm /V (holes) for
CZT and cm /V (both electrons and holes) in HPGe. These
differences in parameters lead to the incomplete charge collec-
tion in CZT devices, particularly for holes. Furthermore, the
mean energy for electron-hole generation in HPGe is eV,
in comparison to eV in CZT, which results in smaller output
signals for the CZT detectors. It is clear from the above com-
parisons that CZT material, even though it can be used at room
Manuscript received July 9, 2004.
The authors are with the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11793
USA (e-mail: bolotnik@bnl.gov).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TNS.2005.851419
0018-9499/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE
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589
temperature, introduces additional obstacles in the implementa-
tion of actual CZT spectroscopic devices.
Three major parameters characterize the performance of a
radiation detector: the detection efficiency, the size of the ac-
tive area, and the energy resolution. Both the efficiency and the
size of the active area are determined by the size of the avail-
able CZT crystals, which are currently small in comparison to
HPGe detectors, less than cm . The ultimate solution of
this problem lies in a way of improving CZT crystal growth
techniques. Meanwhile, arrays or stacks of a large number of
relatively small CZT detectors can be used to build large area
high-efficiency detection systems.
Even with the small size of CZT crystals, it takes some ef-
fort to produce high-performance CZT detectors. In general,
the energy resolution of a semiconductor radiation detector is
determined by three terms: 1) fluctuation in the number of elec-
tron-hole pairs produced, 2) fluctuation in the number of elec-
trons and holes collected, and 3) electronic noise. The first term
depends on the mean energy for electron-hole pair generation,
, and the Fano factor, , where is the par-
ticle’s energy ( denotes the variance of the total number of
electron-hole pairs produced). In high-quality crystals, the Fano
factor is . The second term accounts for fluctuations of
the trapped charge. In the case of HPGe detectors—which can
be considered as the ideal case—the trapping centers are dis-
tributed uniformly. Thus, the contribution due to the fluctuation
of the trapped charge (variance) is , where
and are the carriers drift and life times. (If ,
then this term can be neglected.) In contrast to HPGe, the traps
distribution is not uniform in CZT material and, as a result, the
above equation may be not valid. Indeed, the charge generated
by an ionizing particle is localized inside a small area of the de-
tector, and if the trap distribution is not uniform, the collected
charge could have additional fluctuations. The third term is the
electronic noise, which is typically dominated by the shot noise
due to detector leakage current. In the case of the CZT detectors
operating at room temperature, the leakage current becomes the
most critical parameter determining the energy resolution for
devices with good charge collection.
Usually, CZT detectors operate as electron-only devices to
eliminate the influence of the uncollected holes. In such de-
vices, the electron contribution into the output signal is pro-
portional to the total charge produced by an ionized particle.
As for the holes, their contribution depends on the detector ge-
ometry and where electron-hole pairs were originally produced.
As a rule, the uncollected holes degrade the energy resolution
of CZT gamma-ray detectors; this effect is especially strong
in planar devices with monolithic contacts. Several contact de-
590
signs have been proposed to reduce the effect of the uncollected
holes in CZT material [2]–[9]. Two of the designs, pixel and
coplanar-grid, are widely used in CZT gamma-ray detectors. All
these designs have an analog among gaseous detectors—an ion-
ization chamber with a shielding (Frisch) grid. The only differ-
ence is that there is no actual shielding grid in CZT devices: the
grid is virtually created by choosing a certain electrode configu-
ration. As in the case of gaseous detectors [10], the virtual grid in
CZT devices does not provide 100% “shielding” from the holes.
As a result, the peak in the response function of the device is far
from the -function: it has a finite geometrical width that adds
to the total energy resolution.
In this paper, we review the major factors limiting perfor-
mance of current CZT detectors.
II. EFFECTS OF SURFACE AND BULK LEAKAGE CURRENTS
Bulk and surface conductivity are two important parameters
that 1) determine the total leakage current and 2) affect the
charge collection efficiency in CZT devices, e.g., for pixel and
coplanar-grid detectors. The latter effect can be explained as fol-
lows. In the absence of surface conductivity, the electric field
lines are expected to never intersect the nonmetallized surfaces
because of the surface charge built up in the areas between the
contacts. However, in real CZT detectors, the surface is conduc-
tive. As a result, the built-up charge leaks away and field lines
can intersect the surface areas between the contacts where the
signal charge gets trapped [11]–[13]. To overcome this effect a
differential bias is applied between the adjacent electrodes (e.g.,
in coplanar-grid devices), so a strong electric field inside the gap
forces the electrons on the surface to move toward one of the
contacts, significantly reducing the charge loss. In the case of
pixel detectors, thin steering electrodes (a grid) are placed be-
tween the pixel contacts [14], [15] to eliminate the charge loss.
The main drawback of using the steering electrodes (or ap-
plying a differential bias) is the extra surface leakage current
component that significantly increases the total leakage current
and thermal noise. Moreover, as reported in [16], the surface
conductivity strongly depends on the cathode bias. Thus, the
total leakage current turns out to be more than the sum of two
separately measured bulk and surface components.
Another important feature related to charge collection effi-
ciency is the nonuniformity of the electric field over the detector
thickness caused by the Schottky-barrier contacts. In the over-
simplified case of uniform distribution of space charge, the elec-
tric field strength decreases linearly toward the anode (for n-type
material). In reality, because of the deep trapping levels in CZT,
the field seems to decrease more rapidly, especially at low tem-
peratures.
A. Experimental Setup
Reference [17] describes the experimental setup and mea-
surement procedure that allows one to separate bulk and sur-
face leakage current components and to achieve a steady-state
current and temperature stable conditions during the measure-
ments. All results described here were obtained with pixel detec-
tors whose anode patterns had square pixel contacts surrounded
by guard strips (a grid) [14]. In the case of bulk current mea-
surements, the voltage source was applied to the cathode, while
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 52, NO. 3, JUNE 2005
the grid was kept at zero potential. In the case of surface current,
the voltage was applied to the grid while the cathode was kept
at some potential.
B. Bulk Leakage Current
Fig. 1 shows typical – curves measured for three CZT
samples. The first sample (with sputtered Pt contacts) was
grown and processed by eV-Products, Inc., the second one
(also with sputtered Pt-contacts) was grown by Imarad and
processed by GSFC, and the third one (with electroless Au
contacts) was grown by Yinnel Tech., Inc., and processed at
Brookhaven National Laboratory. The – curves for the first
two samples were taken from [18].
It was shown in [17] that the bulk current could be interpreted
by considering a CZT detector as a metal–semiconductor–metal
system (MSM) with two back-to-back Schottky barriers at the
contacts (see Appendix). Thus, the differences in the curves in
Fig. 1 reflect the differences in material bulk resistivity and sur-
face treatments of the CZT samples. Note that, among the three
curves, only the – curve measured from the Imarad sample
actually resembles a diode-like dependence because of its lower
bulk resistivity and higher voltage bias required to deplete the
crystal.
Four distinguished regions can be seen in – curves. At
the low biases, V, a voltage drop across a Schottky
barrier is very small, and the current is limited by the bulk
resistivity of CZT material (Ohm’s law). This region can be
used to estimate the bulk resistivity, e.g., for the samples
represented in Fig. 1, one can find , and
Ohm-cm for Imarad, eV-Products, and Yinnel Tech.
samples, respectively.
At higher biases, V, the voltage drop across the Schottky
barrier starts gradually increasing while the undepleted (resis-
tive) layer of the sample gets thinner and thinner. This transition
is reflected as a sublinear dependence in the – curves (region
2), e.g., in the case of the Imarad sample. Since the
charge transport across the interface is limited by carrier dif-
fusion in the space-charge region of CZT, the saturation current
follows the voltage dependence of the electric field strength near
the metal–semiconductor interface [19].
For the fully depleted material, the electric field near the
contact is a linear function of the applied voltage. From this
moment, the – curve follows a linear dependence again
resembling ohmic behavior but with very high effective bulk
resistivity (region 3). This region, however, is not always seen
in the – curves because the current may start rising expo-
nentially due to the potential barrier lowering effect (region 4).
The decrease of potential barrier is caused by the voltage de-
veloped across a thin interfacial layer existing between the metal
and the bulk of CZT. Usually, this layer is formed as a side ef-
fect during the fabrication process, e.g., if the detector was ex-
posed to air before depositing contacts. The exact properties of
this layer are unknown: it could be a dielectric, e.g., TeO , or
a p-type semiconductor, e.g., Te, which forms a p–n junction
with CZT. Since the layer is thin, the electrons entering from
the metal can tunnel across the layer with some transmission ef-
ficiency. Thus, regardless of the precise nature of the interfacial
layer, its effect on the leakage current can be described with help
BOLOTNIKOV et al.: FACTORS LIMITING THE PERFORMANCE OF CdZnTe DETECTORS
Fig. 1. Bulk I –V curves measured with CZT samples fabricated by different vendors.
of two parameters: an empirical transmission coefficient, which
takes into account the reflection of the electron, and a potential
lowering, which is in the first approximation proportional to the
applied bias.
The solid lines in Fig. 1 represent the results of the – curve
fittings with the MSM model as described in [17]. For the –
curves shown in Fig. 1, the fit gives similar values for the poten-
tial barrier heights: 0.740 eV (Imarad) and 0.784 eV (eV-Prod-
ucts), and 0.810 eV (Yinnel Tech.), but different values for the
voltage required to deplete the samples: V (eV-Products
and Yinnel Tech.) and much higher bias V (Imarad). The
fact that the Imarad detector requires much higher voltage to
deplete the crystal is due to the lower bulk resistivity of this
material. In [20], the barrier height of Au–CZT Schottky con-
tact fabricated by eV-Products was measured using a different
technique—the photocurrent method. The reported value was
eV, which is very close to that estimated from the
– curve shown in Fig. 1.
An important conclusion that can be made from Fig. 1 is that
the bulk leakage current is not determined by the bulk resistivity
of CZT material, but rather by the properties of the contacts (i.e.,
by the contact fabrication process and possibly the choice of
electrode material).
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591
C. Surface Leakage Current Measurements
The surface conductance becomes an important factor for
contact patterns with steering (biased) electrodes, e.g., in
coplanar-grid or pixel devices. It is also important for the vir-
tual Frisch-grid detectors, since the side surface leakage current
is expected to ensure a uniform distribution of the electric field
inside the detector. In such devices, the surface leakage current
becomes the dominant component to the total leakage current.
The surface conductance in CZT detectors is apparently due
to the presence of a low-resistivity surface layer, which has a
different stoichiometry and defect structure, in comparison with
the bulk-CZT band structure. It is well known that a damaged
surface layer of nonstoichiometric material is formed on the sur-
face of semiconductors after the dicing and polishing. This layer
is normally removed by chemical etching; however, in the case
of CZT, the bromine enchant usually leaves a Te-enriched CZT
surface [21].
Fig. 2 shows the surface – curves measured for a typical
eV-Products CZT detector at zero bias at the cathode [14]. As
shown, in the beginning the current rises as a linear function of
voltage applied across the gap between the pixel contact and the
grid (see Section II-A). Above a certain transition voltage, the
current starts rising as a power law function, , with
592
Fig. 2. Surface current I –V curve (large scale measurements) from [14].
. The transition voltage (or voltage of crossover from Ohm’s
law to power law) is related to a high-injection condition at the
contact, but the current does not rise exponentially because the
space charge accumulated between the contacts limits current
injection from the contacts (see, e.g., [22]).
More accurate – measurements, however, revealed several
features similar to those seen in the bulk – curves. Fig. 3
shows the – curve of the surface leakage current measured
between a pixel contact and the grid at three representative
cathode biases, 300, 0, and 300 V. In this example, the data
were taken with the CZT sample grown by Imarad, Inc., and
processed at NASA/GSFC [18]. As shown, the curves measured
at 300 V cathode bias have three distinct regions: linear below
0.1 V, sublinear around 1 V, and linear again between 10 and
50 V (at higher biases, the current starts rising exponentially
and eventually becomes space charge limited as shown in
Fig. 2). Such an “s”-shape of the – curve is typical (e.g.,
Fig. 1) of a semiconductor device with two Schottky-barrier
contacts. The “s”-shaped feature is less pronounced at 0 V on
the cathode, and at 300 V, the curve is almost linear in a whole
range of voltages. Despite differences at low biases, all of the
measured – curves converge at high biases.
Fig. 4 shows the variations of the surface current versus
cathode bias measured with the same detector at 0.05 V between
the pixel contact and the grid (this bias corresponds to the ohmic
region of the surface current, see Fig. 3), [18]. As shown, the
measured dependence reflects two levels of surface conductance
over a narrow voltage range where the surface resistivity is
switched from a low level to a higher level. Similar behavior
was observed for the samples fabricated by eV-Products [18].
D. Field Effect
Based on the work by Rouse et al. [21], the surface of the
CZT detector consists of an oxide (dielectric) layer and Te (or
Cd)-enriched layer that can be treated as a highly doped surface
layer of CZT. This layer forms a p–n junction with the CZT bulk
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 52, NO. 3, JUNE 2005
and is an analog to an active channel in a field-effect transistor.
The changes in surface leakage shown in Figs. 3 and 4 can be at-
tributed to the depletion (or enhancement) of this highly doped
surface layer when bias is applied between two contacts on the
surface (MSM structure) or to the cathode (field effect). For ex-
ample, in Fig. 4, the – curve measured at positive 300 V
corresponds to the fully depleted layer, while the negative bias
enhances the channel up to its maximum width. The fact that
at high biases all three curves converge means that the surface
layer can be depleted by applying voltage either on the cathode
or between the pixel contact and the grid. As shown in Fig. 4, the
current increases at negative voltages and decreases at positive
biases, i.e., the detector resembles a p-type channel field-effect
transistor operating in depletion mode.
The same MSM model (originally proposed to fit bulk cur-
rents) was applied to fit the surface leakage current – curves
measured at the negative cathode bias that enhances the surface
conductivity [18]. For example, the fit results are shown in Fig. 3
as solid lines for two cases: 300 and 0 V on the cathode. The fit
yields the following parameters: a potential barrier height of 0.51
eV, a carrier mobility of 100 cm /Vs, and a specific resistivity
of Ohm-cm, with a grid voltage required to deplete the
surface layer of 2.5 V. These parameters depend on the assumed
thickness of the layer and the effective Richardson constant,
which were assumed to be 50 nm and 12 A/cm K , respectively.
In the case when no interfacial layer is considered for the
surface, we applied the same fit to the surface current data ob-
tained from the eV-Products sample, which gave the following
results: a potential barrier height of 0.53 eV, a carrier mobility
of 100 cm /Vs, a specific resistivity of Ohm-cm, with
a grid voltage required to deplete the channel surface layer of
0.6 V. These results also point out that the surface layer exhibits
the properties of low resistivity p-type material.
It is interesting to compare the potential barrier heights es-
timated from the – and – measurements, where is the
temperature. In [18], the temperature dependence of the bulk
and surface leakage currents (eV-Products sample) were mea-
sured and fitted with a function , which
represents the temperature dependence of the diffusion-limited
saturation current across the Schottky barrier. Here, is the po-
tential barrier height. The estimates for were found to be 0.57
and 0.84 eV for the surface and the bulk currents, respectively.
As shown, these numbers are different from those obtained from
the – measurements. We believe that the barrier height of
0.51 eV (obtained for the surface current from – measure-
ments) is underestimated because of the two unknown param-
eters assumed in [18]. On the contrary, the height of 0.84 eV
(obtained for the bulk current from – measurements) is over-
estimated because the – curve also reflects a temperature de-
pendence of the electron flux tunneling through the interfacial
layer.
Based on previous discussions, one can conclude that p-type
layers on the surface result in the p-i-p band structure of the
CZT detector shown in Fig. 5. The actual barrier height seen by
electrons entering CZT from the metal is higher by an amount
of 0.29 eV due to a p–n junction at the surface. By comparison,
the increased value in the potential barrier height reported by
Morton et al. [20] is 0.2 eV.
BOLOTNIKOV et al.: FACTORS LIMITING THE PERFORMANCE OF CdZnTe DETECTORS 593

Fig. 3. Surface current I –V curve (small scale measurements) from [18].

Fig. 4. Surface leakage current (resistivity) versus cathode bias from [18].

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594
Fig. 5. Band structure of the metal–CZT interface.
III. CHARGE SHARING EFFECT
Charge sharing events between adjacent contacts is another
important factor limiting the performance of multielectrode
CZT devices such as pixel and coplanar-grid detectors. The
mean squared width of the charge cloud after drifting a distance
under the influence of the electric field is given by one-di-
mensional diffusion as . material properties ( -product), and the dependence of the
Here, is the drift time, is the diffusion coefficient, is the
electric field strength, and V at room tempera-
ture. For a 2-mm-thick detector with an electric field of 1500
V/cm, equals to 24 m [or 56 m full-width at half-maximum
(FWHM)]. This example shows that for small contact sizes
the total charge produced by an incident particle can be shared
between two or more adjacent contacts. Thus, to recover the
total charge one must add the signals read out from two or more
contacts, which increases the electronic noise and complexity
of the readout system. Moreover, since the electric field lines
intersect the surface areas between the contacts, some fraction
of the charge could be lost in the gaps between the contacts. In
turn, the fluctuations in these charge losses degrade the energy
resolution of the device.
The easiest way to illustrate the charge sharing and charge
loss between the contacts is to plot the correlation of the sig-
nals, and in Fig. 6, from two adjacent electrodes for the
events taking place between the contact boundaries [25]. Each
event is represented by a single dot; the dots are located around
the curved line (for events with the same absorbed energies) as
shown in Fig. 6. If all charge is collected, one can expect to
see a straight line, since , where is the
total injected energy (a collimated laser beam was used to mea-
sure curves shown in Fig. 6). The bending indicates that there is
charge loss in the area between the contacts near the surface.
The straightforward solution of this problem is to make very
small gaps between the electrodes [23], but it is not always ac-
ceptable, e.g., in pixel detectors, since the contact areas and as-
sociated load capacitors become too large. Another solution is to
place a thin steering strip [14] or several strips [24] in the gaps
between the contacts. A certain differential bias is required to
push electric field lines off the steering electrodes. The mag-
nitude of the bias depends on both the width of the gap and
steering electrode, but even at very high bias the electrons can
still reach the surface (due to diffusion) and become trapped.
This effect adds fluctuations to the total collected charge and
degrades the energy resolution of the detector.
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IV. FLUCTUATIONS IN CHARGE LOSSES
The main problem related with CZT material is the poor hole
collection efficiency. Several contact designs have been pro-
posed to reduce the effect of the uncollected holes; three of
them—pixel, coplanar-grid, and drift-strip—are used in large-
volume CZT devices. Despite the fact that these designs are very
effective in shielding the holes, the theoretical limit of the en-
ergy resolution in CZT detectors (the statistical limit) has never
been achieved in the large-volume CZT devices. The typical res-
olution obtained with thick, 5 mm, CZT detectors is 2%–3% at
662 keV. This contradicts the fact that the statistical limit was in-
deed achieved with thin, less than 2-mm thick, and small area (or
pixel) devices. In other words, the energy resolution degrades in
those devices in which electrons drift long distances ( 5 mm)
toward the anode electrode (long-drift devices).
Originally, the energy degradation in long-drift devices was
attributed to the two effects (apart from obvious structural
defects in crystals such as grain boundaries, pipes, inclusions,
etc.): large-scale gradual ( 1 mm) variations in the CZT
amount of trapped electrons (electron carrier lifetime) versus
electron drifting time. These effects can be minimized by
using multielectrode contact patterns with a depth correction
technique. However, even with these improvements, the mea-
sured energy resolution in thick devices was found to remain
above its statistical limit. This suggests there could be some
other unaccounted effects degrading the energy resolution in
long-drift CZT devices [26]–[28].
It is clear that the degradation in the energy resolution is cor-
related with large drifting distances for electrons inside the CZT
detectors. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that the cause of the
energy resolution degradation is the fluctuations in the charge
loss along the electron paths. An exact mechanism of these fluc-
tuations is unknown. It can be shown, however, that these fluctu-
ations are not related to the electron loss due to trapping by im-
purities. Indeed, the absorption of a 662-keV photon produces
electron-hole pairs in CZT crystal, of which 10%
are usually lost. If one assumes that trapping centers are ran-
domly distributed inside the material and each center traps a
single electron, then the standard deviation of the number of
the lots electrons is simply the square root of 10% of the total
number of the electrons produced, . From here, the
relative fluctuation is less than 0.1%. This example shows that
the uniformly distributed trapping centers cannot explain large
fluctuations in the charge loss.
The degradation of energy resolution can be explained if we
assume that the CZT material contains randomly distributed mi-
croscopic areas (centers) with very high local concentrations of
traps. The fluctuations in number of such centers encountered
by the electron cloud as it drifts toward the anode and the fluc-
tuations in the charge loss in each of these centers may account
for the observed fluctuations in the total collected charge.
If one assumes that the total number of the electrons lost due
to trapping is , and each trapping center can only trap a single
electron, then the dispersion of the number of the lost charge
simply equals . However, if one assumes
that the charge is trapped by a fewer number of trapping centers
BOLOTNIKOV et al.: FACTORS LIMITING THE PERFORMANCE OF CdZnTe DETECTORS 595

Fig. 6. Correlation of the signals readout from two adjacent pixels from [25].

but with high trap concentration, then one can write for the total The origin of these centers can be related to microscopic de-
number of the lost electrons , where is the average fects existing inside CZT material and by the inherent nature
number of electrons trapped by a single center, and is the of these microscopic defects to accumulate a large number of
average number of centers encountered by the electron cloud traps. In the case of CZT, e.g., such defects could be inclusions
as it drifts toward the anode. If , where and precipitates.
and are the electron drift and life times, then, as a first order of This mechanism could also explain the poor energy resolution
approximation, and can be treated as independent variables. observed with long-drift CdZnTe detectors described in the liter-
Using the error propagation formula, one can find ature. In such cases, the depth correction technique only helps to
eliminate the fluctuations in the collected charge due to random
(1) distribution of the interaction points. New results were recently
reported by Amman et al. [28] who studied the effects of elec-
where and are dispersions of and , respectively. tron trapping nonuniformity in CZT detectors with alpha parti-
As in the previous case, one can put . If we also cles. However, due to the experimental setup limitations, they
assume that , then could not separate effects caused by large-scale nonuniformity
of CZT material and the microscopic defects described above.
(2)
V. CONCLUSION
If then the second term in (2) can be neglected. From Three major effects limiting the performance and ultimately
here the energy resolution in CZT devices were discussed: bulk and
surface leakage currents, effects related to the charge sharing
FWHM (3) between the electrodes, and fluctuations in charge losses along
the electron cloud travel path. In CZT devices with Au and Pt
This means that the fluctuations of the trapped charge are di- contacts, the total leakage current is limited by the properties
rectly proportional to the distance traveled by the electron cloud. of the Schottky barriers at the metal–semiconductor interfaces.

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596
The surface conductance affects the electric-field lines distribu-
tion, which results in charge losses between the adjacent anode
contacts in multielectrode devices. Fluctuations in charge losses
due to electron trapping as the electron cloud drifts toward the
anode could be an additional factor degrading the energy reso-
lution in long-drift CZT devices.
APPENDIX
A commonly accepted model of the Schottky barrier in
metal–semiconductor systems is the so-called thermionic-dif-
fusion theory developed by Crowell and Sze [29]. It gives a
general formula for the saturation current of the reverse
biased device that can be evaluated numerically. There are
two analytical limits of the exact theory historically known
as thermionic and diffusion approximations which lead to the
same diode-like – dependence, as follows:
(A1)
but give different bias dependences for the saturation currents.
An important assumption made in the diffusion approximation
is that the free carriers near the contact are considered to be
at thermal equilibrium with the electrons in the metal contact,
which means that the carrier concentration near the metal–semi-
conductor interface, , is independent of the applied voltage
and can be related to the carrier concentration in the bulk, , in the diffusion-limited case.) In the case of CZT, the resistance
as
(A2)
Here, is the built-in potential. Thus, in the diffusion limit,
the saturation current is simply given by
(A3)
where and are the electron mobility and the electric-field
strength near the contact, respectively. This is true in so-called
“slow” semiconductors; however, if the electron drift velocity
becomes fast enough to break the equilibrium near the contact
(e.g., at high biases) the diffusion approximation is no longer
valid. In the extreme case (fast semiconductors) when the car-
riers near the interface are rapidly swept away in either direc-
tion depending on the polarity of the applied bias, the saturation
current is primary limited by the flux of the carriers thermioni-
cally emitted over the potential barrier. These conditions corre-
spond to the thermionic emission approximation that gives the
following expression for the saturation current:
(A4)
The parameter is called the effective Richardson constant,
(in A-cm K ), where and are the
effective and free electron masses. is the temperature, and
is the barrier height.
The next step in the generalization of the Crowell and Sze
theory is to include the effects related to the interface layer
normally existing between the metal and semiconductor. Wu
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[30] considered two additional effects: the electron transmis-
sion across the interfacial layer and the lowering of the potential
barrier height caused by the voltage drop across the interfacial
layer. The first effect leads to the reduction of the thermionic
flux of the electrons. This is described by means of the trans-
mission coefficient . The second effect is a weak dependence
of the barrier height on the applied voltage. In the first approxi-
mation, this dependence is described as a linear function of the
applied bias:
(A5)
where is the potential barrier at zero bias, and is a model
parameter. This approach can be justified theoretically in the
case of a thin insulating layer (e.g., oxide layer) between the
metal and semiconductor [31].
One more feature should be mentioned when the above theory
is applied to a metal–CZT–metal system. Usually, it is assumed
that the undepleted part of the semiconductor sample has a neg-
ligibly low resistance. Hence, the entire voltage drops across the
depleted layer and the electric field strength—a key parameter in
the theory—can be easily evaluated based on the Schottky-de-
pletion-layer model. In this case, the width of the depletion layer
depends as a root square of the bias, and so does the electric field
at the reversed barrier side of the sample. (This is an important
feature that allows us to identify the type of contact behavior
of the undepleted bulk cannot be neglected, and as a result, the
dependence of the saturation current, the electric field, and the
width of the depletion layer cannot be calculated independently.
All these dependencies become part of the system of equations
derived based on the current continuity principle.
In the Schottky-depleted-layer approximation, if a negative
voltage, , is applied to the cathode, the electric
field distribution, , inside both the depleted and undepleted
regions of the detector can be written as
(A6)
and
(A7)
In the above equations, is the width of the depleted layer,
is the thickness of the CZT crystal, and is the electric field
strength inside the undepleted bulk (same as at the anode),
is the permittivity of CZT, is the electron charge, is the
concentration of ionized donor centers, and is
the potential at the edge of the depleted layer
. Using the boundary condition at the cathode and at the
edge of the depleted layer, the width of the depleted layer can
be found from the following equation:
(A8)
where is the built-in voltage or diffusion potential at the
cathode. From this equation, can be calculated if or is
known. If and then
BOLOTNIKOV et al.: FACTORS LIMITING THE PERFORMANCE OF CdZnTe DETECTORS
, and – , i.e., at the small ap-
plied biases the current follows Ohm’s law. The reach-through
voltage —the voltage required to deplete the whole CZT
sample—is given by
where is the electric field strength at the anode when the
cathode is at , i.e., . Notice, that when
the bulk resistance is neglected, , and (A9) becomes
the standard expression for the flat-band voltage—a parameter
usually defined to characterize the back-to-back barrier system.
For the voltages above
Correspondingly, the electric-field strength at the cathode
given by
and
According to Wu [30], the reverse current density,
over the barrier at the cathode is expressed as
where is the effective Richardson constant, is the tempera-
ture, is the thermal velocity, is the transmission coefficient
through the oxide layer, the series resistance of the bulk, and
. is an effective diffusion velocity that can be
calculated analytically if (A6) is used to approximate the field
distribution in the depleted layer. In this case, is simply the
electron drift velocity at the cathode, namely
where is the electron mobility ( 1000 cm /Vs). The effec-
tive Richardson constant is related to the thermal velocity by
where is the effective density of the states in the conduction
band given by
The Schottky-barrier height, , is a function of the applied
voltage and reflects the barrier lowering due to the voltage drop
across the oxide layer.
The series resistance of the undepleted layer can be expressed
as
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597
where is the equilibrium free electron concentration (we as-
sume that CZT is an n-type semiconductor). Substituting (A17)
into (A13) and using from (A8) and (A11), and from
(A12) one can numerically calculate the – dependence.
(A9)
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