Cadmium Zinc Telluride: the Wonder Material Powering a Medical 'revolution'

In semiconductors with indirect band gap, when electron-hole pairs combine they usually just heat the material, instead of emitting light, which is why silicon, for instance, is not suitable for making LEDs.

Cadmium zinc telluride is a II-VI semiconductor, not a III-V semiconductor, because Cd & Zn belong to the 2nd group, while Te belongs to the 6th group.

Both the III-V & the II-VI semiconductors, and also the few existing I-VII and the few IV-IV semiconductors (e.g. silicon carbide) semiconductors, are compounds of chemical elements whose number of external electrons averages to 4, i.e. the same as in diamond, silicon or germanium, so they can form crystal structures of the same kind.

While a little strain can be beneficial in some cases, the large strain caused by the mismatches in crystal lattice cell size between various semiconductor layers that must be deposited one over the other in order to make some semiconductor device can cause great problems during manufacturing, by generating various defects that may make the process yield unacceptable.

Because of this, when researching new semiconductor materials a lot of effort is dedicated for finding compositions that can have matched lattice cell sizes.

Narrower FWHM means you will miss fewer energy peaks from isotopes.