Investigation into the properties of CdTe detectors for in-situ measurements

As part of a program investigating means to improve gamma-ray spectra obtained with CdTe detectors, we report results obtained with two 10×10×5 mm3 CdTe detectors, one planar the other of quasi-hemispheric geometry. Applying a combination of cooling and pulse rise-time discrimination with the quasi-hemispheric detector, we obtain a resolution of 4 percent at 662 keV and a peak-to-valley ratio of 92 at a loss of approximately 25 percent of the counts in the full-energy region.