Cadmium-Zinc-Tellurium (Cd-Zn-Te) is a relatively new and inexpensive solid state detector with high resolution and detection efficiency. Part of the effort is to develop response functions that describe the output signals from the detector as a function of the energy of the incident photon. This work is in collaboration with physicists from Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

A photon spectrum of Am-241 measured with a 3mm X 3mm X 1mm CZT detector. The blue portion of the curve represents total absorption of the 60 KeV gamma rays. Integrating under this curve indicates that only 50% of the 60 KeV photons incident upon the detector are in the peak with the remaining 50% shifted to lower energies. For example, the signals at 27 KeV and 33 KeV are K x-ray escape peaks from Te and Cd respectively.