Amorphous PbO Photoconductive Film Structure Revealed by Variable-Energy, Doppler-Broadened Positron Annihilation Spectroscopy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Photoconductive amorphous selenium (a-Se) layers are utilized in flat panel X-ray imaging detectors as a direct conversion medium, converting X-ray photons directly into electric charge. Commercial a-Se direct conversion Active Matrix Flat Panel Imagers (AMFPIs) have demonstrated superior image quality in mammography, showcasing the potential of this X-ray imaging technology [1-2]. The use of a-Se is limited, however, by its low Z, resulting in low stopping of high energy X-rays [2]. This limitation is not shared by PbO thin films. Earlier PbO films consisted of small poly-crystalline platelets with low film density and suffered from the presence of both oxygen vacancies and impurity phases (PbO 2 ). Recent advances [3-4] have yielded dense amorphous PbO (a-PbO) films with apparently uniform stoichiometry, as confirmed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). More careful analysis [5] using X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) indicated some tailing of the conduction band, which was attributed to suspected O-vacancies. An annealing study on a-PbO [3] indicated a transition to β-PbO around 500 C. X-ray diffraction (XRD) data of the β-PbO (annealed a-PbO) film matched that of a β-PbO reference, while XAS data did not. This was attributed to the different depths of the sample volumes probed by the two techniques. Doppler-broadened positron annihilation spectroscopy (DBPAS) was conducted on several a-PbO samples synthesized under different conditions using the McMaster Variable-Energy Positron Beam (MVEPB) and the results were modelled using VEPFIT [6]. All samples were found to have a three-layer structure, with the bulk S-parameters between 0.4725 and 0.4753. The two other layers were contained within the first 300nm of the film and varied in thickness, diffusion length and S-parameter value. This confirms the suitability of DBPAS, as a sensitive probe of vacancy-type defects and the layer structure of thin films, to guide the optimization of a-PbO synthesis for photoconductive detectors. Work is underway to produce a series of samples which vary systematically in their synthesis conditions to establish synthesis-structure relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".