Performance of a cooled CdZnTe X-ray detector

We have studied several high-resistivity, room-temperature CdZnTe detectors at temperatures ranging from -20/spl deg/C to -38/spl deg/C. Cooling the detector down reduces the leakage current, which enables the use of low-noise pulsed-optical feedback preamplifiers and higher bias voltages. These factors improve the detector performance significantly; better energy resolution, charge collection and peak-to-background ratio are achieved. Running a 16-mm/sup 2/ Cd/sub 0.9/Zn/sub 0.1/Te detector crystal at -28/spl deg/C, we have obtained energy resolutions of 292 eV at the 5.9-keV line of /sup 55/Fe, and of 0.90 keV at the 59.6-keV line of /sup 241/Am.<
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