Primary Photocurrent in Cadmium Sulfide

Experiments were performed on the photocurrent caused by short flashes of light and by individual {α} particles in high-resistivity cadmium sulfide crystals. It was shown that the photocurrent pulses could be described by the mechanism of the so-called primary photocurrent of both electrons and "holes." The energy lost by an {α} particle per electron-hole pair created was found to be 7.2 ev, which seems somewhat high. Efforts to correlate the primary photocurrent with the so-called edge luminescence were not successful.