Properties of Redlen cadmium zinc telluride with respect to x-ray spectroscopy

We present a study of a sample pixelated cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) detector using CZT purchased from Redlen Technologies. We demonstrate that the material shows good uniformity across the 2 cm × 2 cm × 3 mm crystal in terms of leakage current, gain, and spectral resolution. We find that the detector produces very good spectral resolution for energies up to at least 105 keV, achieving a full-width at half-maxima of 450 eV at 14 keV up to 880 eV at 105 keV using only single-pixel events. Though our analysis of spectra including multiple-pixel events is somewhat limited, we also produce a spectrum including events in which photon energy is deposited across two adjacent pixels. We find that this degrades the energy resolution by up to 30%, but this result can likely be improved using more rigorous calibrations. Additionally, we investigate depth-of-interaction effects, showing that spectral resolution can be improved by 3% to 7% for energies between 86 and 105 keV by removing events beyond a certain depth. Performing this cut reduces efficiency, removing 13% to 21% of photons from the resulting spectral lines.