Abstract: The low-temperature performance of HgCdTe photovoltaic detector is limited by the stress of wafer. In this paper, the stress of HgCdTe passivated by CdTe and ZnS was investigated byusing triple crystal x-ray diffraction and reciprocal space mapping, it is found that under the high sputtering power the wafer is bended due to induced stress, and the mosaic structure is observed. Thelow-stress film is achieved by low-power sputtering and thermal evaporation.