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Characterization of vertical Bridgman grown Cd0.9Zn0.1Te0.97Se0.03 single crystal for room-temperature radiation detection

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Abstract

We report a modified vertical Bridgman method to grow Cd0.9Zn0.1Te0.97Se0.03 (CZTS) single crystals using in-house zone-refined 7 N (99.99999%) purity elemental precursors for room-temperature radiation detection. CZTS is an economic yet high performance alternative to expensive CdZnTe (CZT) detectors for room-temperature gamma-ray detection. Radiation detector in planar geometry has been fabricated on an 11.0 × 11.0 × 3.0 mm3 CZTS single crystal. A bulk resistivity of 1010 Ω.cm has been achieved without using any compensating dopant. The elemental composition of the grown crystal has been examined using energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) analysis. Powder X-ray diffraction (XRD) showed formation of zincblende phase with a lattice constant of 6.447 Å, and sharp peaks confirmed the formation of highly crystalline single-phase CZTS crystals. A modified Vegard’s law has been applied to calculate the atomic percentage of Se in the grown crystals from the XRD patterns and compared with the intended and the measured stoichiometry. The electron mobility-lifetime (μτ) product and the drift mobility have been calculated to be 1.5 × 10–3 cm2/V and 710 cm2/V.s, respectively, using alpha spectroscopy. The presented vertical Bridgman growth method uses a single pass through the controlled heating zone in contrast to the previously reported multiple pass growth techniques, thus, reducing the growth duration by two third which would help to further reduce the cost of production of CZTS-based room-temperature detectors.

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source emitting primarily 5486 keV alpha particles. The detector signal is primarily created by electron transit. b Rise-time spectra obtained from preamplifier pulses under same experimental configuration. Inset shows randomly selected typical charge pulses at four different bias voltages. The increasing sharpness indicates faster charge collection as the bias increases

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support from the X-ray Diffraction Facility at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UofSC, and Electron Microscopy Center at UofSC for the SEM and EDX Measurements.

Funding

This work was supported by the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy’s Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP), Grant No. DE-AC07-051D14517 & DE-NE0008662. The work was also supported in part by the Advanced Support Program for Innovative Research Excellence-I (ASPIRE-I), Grant No. 15530- E404 and Support to Promote Advancement of Research and Creativity (SPARC), Grant No. 15530- E422 of the University of South Carolina (UofSC), Columbia, USA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

    Ritwik Nag, Sandeep K. Chaudhuri, Joshua W. Kleppinger, OmerFaruk Karadavut & Krishna C. Mandal

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  1. Ritwik Nag
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  2. Sandeep K. Chaudhuri
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  3. Joshua W. Kleppinger
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  4. OmerFaruk Karadavut
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  5. Krishna C. Mandal
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Contributions

RN contributed to crystal growth, detector fabrication, characterization, and literature survey; SKC was involved in detector fabrication, characterization, data analysis and interpretation, and manuscript preparation; JWK played his part in crystal growth and detector characterization; OFK has carried out crystal growth and detector characterization; KCM contributed to conceptualization, investigation, fund acquisition, supervision, data analysis, and manuscript preparation—review and editing.

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Correspondence to Krishna C. Mandal.

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Nag, R., Chaudhuri, S.K., Kleppinger, J.W. et al. Characterization of vertical Bridgman grown Cd0.9Zn0.1Te0.97Se0.03 single crystal for room-temperature radiation detection. J Mater Sci: Mater Electron 32, 26740–26749 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-021-07051-6

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