  We studied the effects of bulk and surface conductivity on the performance of
high-resistivity CdZnTe (CZT) pixel detectors with Pt contacts. We emphasize
the difference in mechanisms of the bulk and surface conductivity as indicated
by their different temperature behaviors. In addition, the existence of a thin
(10-100 A) oxide layer on the surface of CZT, formed during the fabrication
process, affects both bulk and surface leakage currents. We demonstrate that
the measured I-V dependencies of bulk current can be explained by considering
the CZT detector as a metal-semiconductor-metal system with two back-to-back
Schottky-barrier contacts. The high surface leakage current is apparently due
to the presence of a low-resistivity surface layer that has characteristics
which differ considerably from those of the bulk material. This surface layer
has a profound effect on the charge collection efficiency in detectors with
multi-contact geometry; some fraction of the electric field lines originated on
the cathode intersects the surface areas between the pixel contacts where the
charge produced by an ionizing particle gets trapped. To overcome this effect
we place a grid of thin electrodes between the pixel contacts; when the grid is
negatively biased, the strong electric field in the gaps between the pixels
forces the electrons landing on the surface to move toward the contacts,
preventing the charge loss. We have investigated these effects by using CZT
pixel detectors indium bump bonded to a custom-built VLSI readout chip.
