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Dr Kshama Wechalekar with the latest scanner at London's Royal Brompton Hospital
Sedgefield, UK — A notoriously difficult-to-manufacture semiconductor, Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CZT), is at the heart of breakthroughs across astrophysics, medical imaging, and global security, driving a global scramble for supply that is challenging major research institutions.
CZT is prized for its ability to detect photon particles in X-rays and gamma rays with incredible precision in a single conversion step, creating detailed, spectroscopic “colour” images.
Special furnaces are needed to make CZT
Critical for Science and Security
The material’s unique properties are essential for multiple high-stakes applications:
Medical Imaging: At Royal Brompton Hospital in London, CZT-based scanners have cut patient examination times from 45 to 15 minutes while improving the quality of 3D lung images.
Security: CZT detectors are currently used for explosives detection at UK airports and scanning checked baggage in the US, with expectations to move into the hand luggage segment soon.
Astrophysics: Professor Henric Krawczynski at Washington University in St Louis seeks thin CZT detectors for X-ray telescopes that observe phenomena like neutron stars and plasma around black holes.
Very few organisations can supply cadmium zinc telluride
High Demand Meets Difficult Production
Despite its utility, CZT remains notoriously hard to produce. Arnab Basu, founding chief executive of Kromek, one of the world’s few industrial-scale manufacturers, describes the painstaking, weeks-long process where powder is heated and solidified in furnaces, rearranging atoms into a single-crystal structure.
The demand for the highly specialized material is currently outpacing supply. Professor Krawczynski reported difficulty in sourcing very thin, 0.8mm pieces for his space telescopes, an issue compounded by the recent US government shutdown, which has halted his upcoming mission dates.
Enabling UK Research
In the UK, the material is central to the half-a-billion-pound upgrade of the Diamond Light Source research facility in Oxfordshire. This synchrotron produces X-rays for material analysis, but the upgrade will make the X-rays significantly brighter—too powerful for existing sensors.
Matt Veale, group leader for detector development at the Science and Technology Facilities Council, confirmed that without CZT-based detectors, the entire upgrade is pointless: “There’s no point in spending all this money in upgrading these facilities if you can’t detect the light they produce.” The installation of CZT is critical to the project’s completion, currently slated for 2030.
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