Title
Characterization of Amorphous Selenium Alloy Detectors for x-rays and High Energy Nuclear Radiation Detection
Document Type
Article
Subject Area(s)
Electrical Engineering, Optics, Physics
Abstract
Synthesized amorphous selenium (a-Se) alloy materials have been characterized for room temperature high-energy nuclear radiation detector and x-ray detection applications. The alloy composition has been optimized to ensure good charge transport properties and detector performance. The synthesis of a-Se (As, Cl) alloys has been carried out by thoroughly mixing zone-refined (ZR) Se (~7N) with previously synthesized a-Se(As) and a-Se(Cl) master alloys (MS). The synthesized alloys have been characterized by x-ray diffraction (XRD), glow discharge mass spectroscopy (GDMS), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and current-voltage (I-V) characteristics measurements. Raman spectroscopy demonstrated that the a-Se(As) master alloy samples were in metastable monoclinic Se8 states, in which seven vibrational modes are located at 40(41), 59(60), 77, 110, 133, 227(228) and 251(252) cm-1. However, a-Se(Cl) master alloy samples are in stable form of trigonal structure of Se8 ring, in which two modes at 142 and 234 cm-1 were found. Both Raman and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) exhibited that a small amount of tellurium (Te) existed in a-Se (As, Cl) master alloy samples. DSC measurements showed that a-Se (Cl) MS and a-Se (As) MS samples have one melting point, located at ~219.6°C, whereas a-Se-As (0.52%)-Cl and Se- As(10.2%)-Cl(60 ppm) both possess two melting points, located at 221 and 220.3°C respectively. The a-Se alloy plate detectors have been fabricated and tested and the results showed high dark resistivity (1012 - 1013 Ω-cm) with good charge transport properties and cost-effective large-area scalability.
Publication Info
Published in Proceedings of SPIE, Volume 8852, 2013.
K. C. Mandal, A. Mehta, S. K. Chaudhuri, Y. Cui, M. Groza, and A. Burger, “Characterization of amorphous selenium alloy detectors for x-rays and high energy nuclear radiation detection,” Proceedings of SPIE 8852, 88521O (2013).
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