The Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride Imager (CZTI) is one of the four X-ray instruments onboard AstroSat. CZTI equipped with a Coded Aperture Mask has the following salient features:
- High stopping power, low thermal noise and room temperature operation,
- Excellent energy and spatial resolution,
- Low background,
- Unmatched broadband (0.3 - 100 keV) capability when CZTI is combined with two other instruments SXT and LAXPC onboard AstroSat.
CZTI provides crucial hard X-ray data for wide band X-ray spectroscopic observations of X-ray binaries, AGNs and other bright X-ray sources. Background suppression using a veto detector, background measurement using a Coded Aperture Mask, continuous calibration using an alpha-tagged X-ray source are some of the features of this payload. Time tagged individual photon data on a continuous basis provides an excellent opportunity to understand and correct the systematic errors in the spectral data.