Modelling and 3D optimisation of CdTe pixels detector array geometry – Extension to small pixels

CdTe and CdZnTe pixel detectors offer great interest for many applications, especially for medical and industrial imaging. Up to now, the material, generally, used and investigated for pixel arrays was CZT (Hamel et al., IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. 43 (3) (1996) 1422; Barrett et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 75 (1) (1995) 156; Bennett et al., Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A 392 (1997) 260; Eskin et al., J. Appl. Phys. 85 (2) (1999) 647; Brunett et al., J. Appl. Phys. 86 (7) (1999) 3926; Luke, Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A 380 (1996) 232), but cadmium telluride can also be an appropriate choice, as shown here. However, we clearly demonstrate here that the optimal pixel configuration is highly dependent on the electrical transport properties of the material. Depending on the field of primary interest, either energy resolution or counting rate efficiency in the photopeak, the geometry for each case has to be optimised. For that purpose, we have developed a calculation of the signal induced onto the pixel. Two distinct parts are used: after showing our approach for the weighting potential calculation, we present our results performed by a “pseudo-Monte Carlo” simulation. Results are supported by a few experimental comparisons. We argue about the optimum sizes with clarifying the problems caused by too small and too large pixel sizes. The study field is chosen to be vast, i.e. pixel size to detector thickness ratios (W/L) of 1/8–1, and detector thickness of 1.0–8.0 mm. In addition, several electrical transport properties are used. Since efficiency is often of primary interest, thick detectors could be very attractive, which are shown to be really feasible even on CdTe.