Multielemental segregation coefficient of thallium bromide impurities from inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy measurements

Thallium bromide (TlBr) is a compound semiconductor with a high atomic number and wide band gap, being a very promising material to be used as room temperature radiation detectors. The commercial TlBr powder is used for growing crystals for detector applications. To reduce impurities, this material is purified by the zone refining technique. In this work the trace impurities at ppm level were analyzed using ICP-MS, before and after zone refining. The efficiency of the purification was analyzed theoretically from the experimental data of the segregation coefficient estimated. Three impurities were described in this work: lithium (k=0.381), barium (k=0.699) and chromium (k=0.546).