Interaction between iodine and CdTe in closed tube diffusions

The compatibility of iodine and CdTe is discussed and methods by which CdTe can be doped with iodine from the vapour phase using closed tube diffusion techniques are described. At elevated temperatures ( ⩾ 100 ‡C) an elemental iodine diffusion source was found to be unsuitable since it caused severe degradation of the CdTe surface, even when elemental Cd was added to the diffusion source. To overcome this difficulty the compound CdI2 was produced and used successfully at temperatures up to 600 ‡C.