<title>Applications of CdTe detectors in x-ray imaging and metrology</title>

Abstract

Operating as a photoconductor, the sensitivity and the impulse response of semi-insulating materials greatly depend on the excitation duration compared to electron and hole lifetimes. The characteristic of ohmic contact for these compounds is briefly discussed. Before developing picosecond measurements with integrated autocorrelation system, this paper explains high energy industrial tomographic application with large CdTe detectors (25 X 15 X 0.9 mm<SUP>3</SUP>) where spatial resolution, contrast, and wide dynamic are the main criteria. The excitation is typically microsecond(s) range. X-ray flash radiography with 10 ns burst is in an intermediate time domain where excitation is similar to electron life-time in cadmium telluride. In a laser fusion experiment the excitation is in the range of 50 ps and we develop for such high band devices photoconductive structures able to study very short x-ray emission. Thin polycrystalline MOCVD CdTe films with picosecond response are an alternative material suitable to perform optical correlation measurements of single shot pulses with a very large bandwidth (approximately 50 GHz).