Pixellated thallium bromide detectors for gamma-ray spectroscopy and imaging

Recently, pixellated semiconductor detectors exhibit high-energy resolution, which have been studied actively and fabricated from CdTe, CZT and HgI2. Thallium bromide (TlBr) is a compound semiconductor characterized with its high atomic numbers (Tl=81, Br=35) and high density (7.56 g/cm3). Thus, TlBr exhibits higher photon stopping power than other semiconductor materials used for radiation detector fabrication such as CdTe, CZT and HgI2. The wide band gap of TlBr (2.68 eV) permits the detectors low-noise operation at around room temperature. Our studies made an effort to fabricate pixellated TlBr detectors had sufficient detection efficiency and good charge collection efficiency. In this study, pixellated TlBr detectors were fabricated from the crystals purified by the multipass zone-refining method and grown by the horizontal traveling molten zone (TMZ) method. The TlBr detector has a continuous cathode over one crystal surface and 3×3 pixellated anodes (0.57×0.57 mm2 each) surrounded by a guard ring on the opposite surface. The electrodes were realized by vacuum evaporation of palladium through a shadow mask. Typical thickness of the detector was 2 mm. Spectrometric performance of the TlBr detectors was tested by irradiating them with 241Am (59.5 keV), 57Co (122 keV) and 137Cs (662 keV) gamma-ray sources at temperature of –20°C. Energy resolutions (FWHM) were measured to be 4.0, 6.0 and 9.7 keV for 59.5, 122 and 662 keV gamma-rays, respectively.