Recent Results in TlBr Detector Crystals Performance

Recent developments in TlBr material preparation and growth technology have led to much improved crystal quality, detector performances and most importantly, reproducibility. In this paper, we describe some of the technological steps we have developed that have allowed us to produce reproducible spectrometric grade crystals for detector applications and present spectroscopic results. Typical crystals have a specific resistance of (3-5) times10¹¹ Ohm-cm and mobility-life time products of about ~10^-4 cm² /V, for both electrons and the holes. After fabrication into simple planar detectors of area 5 times 5 mm² and thickness 2 mm, spectral resolutions of 0.8, 1.4, 2.1, and 7.1 keV, have been achieved at incident energies of 5.9, 59.6, 122, and 662 keV, respectively. These results were obtained without collimation or employing single carrier sensing or depth correction techniques.