-Search For a Correlation Between Stoichiometry,TSC Spectra and -NUclear Spectroscopic Capabilities of HCI2.

Abstract

ABSTRACTMercuric iodide is, potentially, an interesting material for room temperature high efficiency gamma or X-ray spectroscopy. However, still several parameters limit the performance of these devices and even the crystal growth is not fully under control today, poor reproductibility being reached.An optimization of growth conditions seems difficult since no parameter of the material could be correlated with the spectrometer's performance. Therefore, the effective progress in recent years was rather limited.The goal of this paper is to investigate systematically if a correlation can be found between bulk stoichiometry for crystal grown under certain conditions, thermally stimulated current (TSC) measurements and nuclear performance. In this study, two families of crystals could be identified. Best results are obtained for nearly stoichiometric materials, exhibiting a specific TSC spectrum. In particular, the peak appearing at 173 K constitutes a good indication of the detection capabilities of the material, both for spectroscopic resolution and polarization.The growth conditions have been adjusted to produce in a fully reproducible way high performance devices.