Preliminary Studies on Mercuric Iodide Soft-Gamma-Ray Detector

Tetragonal mercuric iodide single crystals were grown and applied to the fabrication of soft-gamma-ray detectors with high detection efficiencies and moderate energy resolutions. The studies included: 1) the dependency of single crystals grown by various techniques such as solution growth including recrystallization of the vapor transport grown crystal, vapor transport growth and temperature oscillation growth techniques on detector characteristics, 2) polarization effects, 3) electrical contacts problem, 4) fast-neutron-induced radiation damage and 5) linearity between pulse heights and energies. The detectors with various thicknesses from approximately 50 to 1000 microns were applied to the X-ray fluorescence analysis proved to be a very promising tool in this field for the linearity calibration and charge collection efficiencies examination of the detector of various thicknesses.