High quality planar Cd1-xMnxTe room-temperature radiation detectors

Cd1-xMnxTe is a promising material that has been introduced as a potential successor for the popular Cd1-xZnxTe material in the field of room-temperature gamma-ray detection. In this work, we demonstrate a planar array on a 5 mm thick Cd1-xMnxTe detector with spectroscopy performance similar to that of industrial Cd1-xZnxTe devices of the same thickness. The uniformity of Cd1-xMnxTe was theoretically predicted and experimentally demonstrated to be superior to that of Cd1-xZnxTe due to a better solubility of manganese. The main challenge until now was to exhibit large area, thick Cd1-xMnxTe arrays with satisfactory spectroscopy performance. In this Letter, static as well as spectroscopic properties of thick Cd1-xMnxTe devices are compared to those of conventional Cd1-xZnxTe detectors, grown by the same technology (horizontal Bridgman).