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Cadmium zinc telluride

Metal alloy

Cadmium zinc telluride, (CdZnTe) or CZT, is a compound of cadmium, zinc and tellurium or, more strictly speaking, an alloy of cadmium telluride and zinc telluride. A direct bandgap semiconductor, it is used in a variety of applications, including semiconductor radiation detectors, photorefractive gratings, electro-optic modulators, solar cells, and terahertz generation and detection.

Characteristics

A Cs-137 gamma-ray spectrum collected using an M400 pixelated CZT imaging spectrometer. Energy resolution, as measured by full-width-at-half-maximum (FWHM), is better than 1%.

The CZT band gap varies from approximately 1.4 to 2.2 eV, depending on composition. A 1 cm3 CZT crystal has a sensitivity range of 30 keV to 3 MeV with a 2.5% FWHM energy resolution at 662 keV. Pixelated CZT with a volume of 6 cm3 can achieve 0.71% FWHM energy resolution at 662 keV and perform Compton imaging.

Applications

Radiation detectors using CZT can operate in direct-conversion (or photoconductive) mode at room temperature, unlike some other materials (particularly germanium) which require cooling or technologies that require a photomultiplier tube. Their relative advantages include high sensitivity for X-rays and gamma rays, due to the high atomic numbers of Cd and Te, and better energy resolution than scintillator detectors. This allows for reduced radiation dosagd, reduced data acquisition time, and small instruments.

CZT can be formed into different shapes for different radiation-detecting applications, and a variety of electrode geometries, such as coplanar grids and small pixel detectors, have been developed to provide unipolar (electron-only) operation, thereby improving energy resolution.

Production

Monocrystalline CZT is produced by only a few companies worldwide, with demand exceeding supply in 2025. Furthermore, China placed export controls on CZT in 2025. Consequently, some projects may recycle CZT from other equipment, or use the cadmium telluride as a substitute.

References

(2025-12-12). "'It's amazing' – the wonder material very few can make".
(1994). "Properties of Narrow Gap Cadmium-based Compounds". INSPEC.
(2021). "Miniaturised Low-Cost Gamma Scanning Platform for Contamination Identification, Localisation and Characterisation: A New Instrument in the Decommissioning Toolkit". Sensors.
(2012). "Characterization of the H3D ASIC Readout System and 6.0 cm³ 3-D Position Sensitive CdZnTe Detectors". IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science.
(15 November 2010). "GE Healthcare Acquires CZT Detector Company". Diagnostic and Intervention Cardiology.
(2011). "Small pixel CZT detector for hard X-ray spectroscopy". Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment.
(15 June 2018). "Nuclear Imaging Moves Toward Digital Detector Technology". Diagnostic and Interventional Cardiology.
(1995). "Unipolar charge sensing with coplanar electrodes -- application to semiconductor detectors". [[IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science]].
(2011). "Pixellated Cd(Zn)Te high-energy X-ray instrument". Journal of Instrumentation.
(7 February 2025). "China adds export restrictions for minerals used in thin-film solar". pv magazine.

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cadmium-compounds zinc-compounds tellurides ii-vi-semiconductors nonlinear-optical-materials terahertz-technology electro-optical-materials ionising-radiation-detectors

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