Study on Thallium Bromide Radioactive Detector

Thallium bromide (TlBr) is a compound semiconductor material, which can be used for X-ray and gamma-ray detectors and can be used at room temperature. It has excellent physical properties, high atomic number and density, wide bandgap (B = 2.68 eV), and low ionization energy. Compared with other X-ray and gamma-ray detection materials, TlBr devices have high detection efficiency and excellent energy resolution performance. So TlBr is suitable for housing in small tubes or shells, and it can be widely used in nuclear material measurement, safeguards verification, national security, space high-energy physics research, and other fields. Based on the fabrication of TlBr prototype detector, this paper focuses on the device fabrication and signal acquisition technology. Gamma-ray spectrum measurements and performance tests are carried out with AM-241 radioactive source. The results show that the special photoelectric peak of 59.5 keV is clearly visible, and the optimal resolution is 4.15 keV (7%).

First in-beam application of thallium bromide semiconductor detectors to particle-induced X-ray emission

For the first time, particle-induced X-ray emission (PIXE) spectra were obtained using TlBr detectors. The TlBr detector was fabricated from a crystal grown with material purified by the zone purification. Its active volume was 1.5 mm × 1.5 mm × 3.1 mm, and it exhibited an energy resolution of a 6.2 keV full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) for 59.5 keV at room temperature. The detector was installed into a PIXE system at Aomori Prefecture Quantum Science Center. A Pb plate target in the PIXE chamber was irradiated with a 20 MeV proton beam, and X-ray peaks for Pb K[Formula: see text] and K[Formula: see text] were successfully detected by the TlBr detector at room temperature.