In the high-luminosity era of the Large Hadron Collider, the instantaneous luminosity is expected to reach unprecedented values, resulting in up to 200 proton-proton interactions in a typical bunch crossing. To cope with the resulting increase in occupancy, bandwidth and radiation damage, the ATLAS Inner Detector will be replaced by an all-silicon system, the Inner Tracker (ITk). The innermost...
The need for increased computing keeps growing at ultra high speed, required to support an ever larger and wider range of applications, with generative AI significantly accelerating this trend. Logic standard cell shrinkage remains at the core of the compute roadmap. Its momentum is expected to carry on, even as 2D scaling has become increasingly challenging, by introducing novel device...
Pixel sensors will face new challenges to provide the enhanced performances required by the next generation of ground and space astronomical observatories. Dedicated pixel CMOS sensors are now competing with the traditional CCD designs, offering opportunities for new readout methods. On the other hand, the study of CCD sensor characteristics allows to reach the precision required by surveys...
For decades, silicon microstrip detectors have been the preferred technology for tracking particles in space, allowing the realisation and operation of successful missions as AMS-02 and FERMI LAT, which are providing remarkable scientific results. However, the next generation of experiments aims to push our understanding even further, and will require significant improvements in tracking...
Low-light imaging applications, such as astronomy or microscopy, require low-noise image sensors. Noise levels far below 1 $e^-_{rms}$ are pursued. Single-photon detection is considered the holy grail of image sensing.
Existing imaging technologies capable of detecting and resolving individual photons like Photomultiplier Tubes (PMT), Single Photon Avalanche Diodes (SPAD), and Electron...
High voltage CMOS (HV-CMOS) sensors are novel monolithic CMOS active pixel sensors designed for future particle tracking detectors satisfying exceptional performance requirements. These sensors have the advantages of a fully monolithic structure, low manufacturing cost, low material budget, fast charge collection, and high radiation tolerance. Derived from ATLASPix3 (for High-Luminosity Large...
Abstract- Experiments that study charged cosmic rays in space combine a tracker and calorimeter to measure the charge magnitude, the energy, and the momentum of the incoming particles. However, secondary particles created in the calorimeter and entering the tracker will degrade the reconstruction capability of the instrument. Most of the tracker systems in these experiments use micro-strip...
The development of the new fourth-generation storage rings (or diffraction-limited storage rings, DLSR) poses new challenges to detectors in many aspects, the main one being the much-increased photon flux, exceeding the count rate capabilities of many of the actual single photon-counting detectors.
For this reason, the PSD detector group of the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI, Switzerland)...
The MÖNCH detector is a charge integrating prototype Hybrid Pixel Sensor with 25 µm pixel pitch. With low noise pixel architectures and the charge sharing effect, the position of the impinging photon can be interpolated into virtual sub-pixels enabling high spatial resolution. The small pixel pitch also offers excellent native resolution with high frame-rates. The MÖNCH detector has already...
SHINE (Shanghai HIgh repetitioN rate XFEL and Extreme light facility) is the first XFEL facility working in the hard X-ray region in China. To fulfill the special requirements of SHINE, a new pixel array detector, STARLIGHT (SemiconducTor Array detectoR with Large dynamIc ranGe and cHarge integrating readout), is being developed. HYLITE (High dYnamic range free electron Laser Imaging...
The current programme of upgrades to the ATLAS detector to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the HL-LHC will include a complete replacement of the tracking system. This upgrade will install an all-silicon tracker called the ITk, the innermost five layers will be made up of Si Pixel detectors.
The majority of the installed Si detectors are Quad Pixel detectors. These are ~4x4...
We present the design and implementation of a comprehensive testing setup for validating pixelated detectors, emphasizing rapid prototyping and minimizing printed circuit board design and debugging efforts. The system features an off-the-shelf embedded controller with an Intel CPU running under LinuxRT, paired with an Artix 7 FPGA. This FPGA supports both VHDL and LabVIEW code, enhancing setup...
The ITkPixV2 readout chip is the production readout chip for the ATLAS Phase 2 upgrade for the High-Luminosity LHC of the ATLAS inner detector, scheduled for commissioning at the start of 2029. The innermost layers of the ATLAS ITk pixel detector are expected to reach maximum hit rates of 3GHz/cm^2, a total radiation dose of 1 GRad, and data readout rates of 5Gbps, with an operational lifetime...
CMOS image sensors nowadays the dominant imaging technology, are being deployed in many applications, from consumer to machine vision, from industrial to automotive. They are now also used in scientific as well as medical and life science. In these fields, the requirements can be as varied as very low noise for scientific applications, or area coverage for medical and speed for life science....
The 100µPET project is developing a pre-clinical medical scanner for positron-emission tomography (PET) with ultra-high-resolution molecular imaging capabilities. The scanner is composed of multiple layers of monolithic active pixel sensors (MAPS) connected to flexible printed circuits (FPC). With pixels of 150 µm pitch and a thickness of 280 µm + 300 µm (MAPS + FPC), the scanner achieves...
Neutrons are one of the main secondary radiations produced by particle accelerators. They are therefore a key element in the radiation protection of facilities used for fundamental research or medical and industrial applications (production of radionuclides, hadrontherapy, sterilization). The main risks relate both to the radiation dose received by people exposed to neutrons (workers,...
Due to the physical principles of the energy deposition of charged particles in matter, proton therapy allows a very precise dose deposition in the tumour, which leads to better protection of healthy tissue compared to photon radiotherapy. At the same time, the maximum dose deposition at the end of the proton trajectory is more sensitive to uncertainties in the range of the protons. A...
Correlations of photons from entangled quantum sources offer advantages and provide additional opportunities such as low light imaging or new sensing approaches. In general, strong spectro-temporal correlations inherent for entangled photons make those sensing techniques much more precise and resource efficient. To take advantage of the correlations one would need efficient single photon...
Future experiments at high-luminosity hadron colliders will involve unprecedent levels of pile up, calling for precise time information at the pixel level to ease distinguishing between particle tracks. The unique geometry of 3D sensors enables to achieve very good timing performance, besides high radiation hardness. Remarkable results in terms of timing resolution have so far been reported...
High Energy Physics at future colliders demands a new generation of particle detectors with capabilities exceeding those of current silicon technology. For example, at the various $e^+e^-$ machines (CEPC, CLIC, FCC-ee, and ILC), the key requests are low material budget and excellent spatial resolution, with modest requests for radiation resistance or precise timing ($\sigma_t < 50$ ps). On the...
I. Introduction
The v1 and v2 MiniCACTUS sensors are monolithic CMOS sensors in LF15A technology, designed to investigate the possiblity of tagging time of arrival of Minimum Ionizing Particles with a resolution better than 100 ps. These sensors are a first step towards an ultimate time resolution of 20 ps, needed for future projects like FCC-ee. MiniCactus v1 and v2 feature arrays of...
While silicon industry advances to smaller and smaller feature sizes, silicon particle detectors struggle to follow that miniaturisation. One of the main bottlenecks are the relatively large transistors required for the optimal performance of the analogue frontend. Particam instead uses a digital only approach which is focused on digital storage cells switching due to transient radiation...
Last advanced TEM techniques are dedicated to the observation of sensitive materials which can be damaged with the electron dose, such as biological specimen. In this situation it is mandatory to use a low dose and conventional beam energies (200keV). Consequently, electron detectors need to have a gain as high as possible while maintaining high spatial resolution performances. Nowadays,...
For particle counting detectors with high repetition rate, low latency and low jitter using direct detection of incident electrons, a short transit time of the secondary generated electrons and holes within the pixel structure is required. Additionally, for a pixel array that spans a large area, we wish to minimize the overall power consumption by minimizing the number of pixels, implying...
The CMOS Sensor MIMOSIS is being developed to equip the Micro Vertex Detector (MVD) of the CBM experiment at FAIR in Darmstadt, Germany. It will feature 1024 × 504 pixels and combine a time resolution of 5 µs with a spatial resolution of ∼ 5 µm. Moreover, it will have to handle a peak rate of 80 MHz/cm² and radiation doses of 5 MRad and up to 1e14 neq/cm² per year. It is being developed within...
MALTA2 is a Depleted Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor designed to meet the challenging requirements of future collider experiments, in particular extreme radiation tolerance and high hit rate . It is fabricated in a modified Tower 180 nm CMOS imaging technology to mitigate performance degradation caused by irradiation up to 100 MRad of Total Ionising Dose and $3 \times...
The DESY II Test Beam Facility offers electrons with a user selectable momentum ranging from 1-6 GeV alongside beam telescopes as precise reference tracking systems. Whilst providing a very high spatial resolution, they provide no timestamps for individual hits within the readout frame. The length of this readout frame means the telescopes frequently read out hits from multiple electrons...
In this presentation the latest developments on detectors made of wide-band-gap materials for applications in high energy physics experiments will be discussed. In particular the status of SiC, GaN and Diamond based detector developments will be reviewed and the plans of the newly formed DRD3 collaboration with it's focus on wide-bandgap materials in working group 6 will be...
In the hadron collider experiments, many silicon detectors have been used for the tracking detection. When these semiconductor detectors are exposed to high radiation level, their detector performances are degraded by the radiation damage. It becomes a serious problem for the future collier experiment expected higher radiation levels. Therefore, new semiconductors in place of silicon with high...
Simulation-guided design represents a fundamental contribution towards the development of modern semiconductor devices aiming to reach high-performance particle detection, identification and tracking, and constitutes a strategic element of the new detector R&D roadmap.
At the same time, the complexity of microelectronic structures and the related detection systems is drastically increasing,...
The tracking performance of the ATLAS detector relies critically on its 4-layer Pixel Detector. As the closest detector component to the interaction point, this detector is subjected to a significant amount of radiation over its lifetime. At present, at the start of 2024-Run3 LHC collision ATLAS Pixel Detector on innermost layers, consisting of
planar and 3D pixel sensors, will operate after...
This article presents a new global shutter pixel design with radiation-hardened-by-design(RHBD) device modifications and correlated double sampling (CDS). Global Shutter Imagers presents undeniable advantages by exposing all pixels simultaneously. Once in-pixel storage is included, the pixel readout can be operated simultaneously with exposure, enabling faster operation and flashed light....
CMS will undergo a major upgrade to prepare for the High-Luminosity phase of the LHC. Within the frame of this upgrade, studies on a novel passive sensor production technique for planar hybrid detectors have been performed. The sensors were produced using a commercial CMOS production process with a feature size of 150nm. This process enables the use of stitching to produce large sensors out of...
The increased particle flux expected at the HL-LHC poses a serious challenge for the ATLAS detector performance, especially in the forward region which has reduced detector granularities. The High-Granularity Timing Detector (HGTD), featuring novel Low-Gain Avalanche Detector silicon technology, will provide pile-up mitigation and luminosity measurement capabilities, and augment the new...
A gaseous beam monitor utilizing gas electron multiplier (GEM) and pixel sensors is being developed for the Cooling Storage Ring (CSR) external-target experiment (CEE) at Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL). The beam monitor is mainly used to track each beam particle, providing an accurate reconstruction of the primary vertex of the collision. Two generations of the pixel sensors...
The Belle II experiment currently records data at the SuperKEKB e+e- collider, which holds the world luminosity record of 4.7x10^34 cm-2.s-1 and plans to push up to 6x10^35 cm-2 s-1. In such luminosity range for e+e- collisions, the inner detection layers should both cope with a hit rate dominated by beam-induced parasitic particles and provide minute tracking precision. A R&D program has...
Following in the footsteps of the LHC, the Future Circular Collider (FCC) will be the next multi-generational international collider project. In the first stage, FCC-ee will collide intense beams of electrons and positrons at centre of mass energies between 88 and 365 GeV, making it an electroweak, flavour, Higgs and top factory. The unprecedented statistical precision requires FCC-ee...
The MONOLITH H2020 ERC Advanced project aims at producing a high-granularity monolithic silicon pixel detector with picosecond-level time stamping. Such extreme timing exploits: i) fast and low-noise SiGe BiCMOS electronics; ii) a novel sensor concept: the Picosecond Avalanche Detector (PicoAD), that uses a patented multi-PN junction to engineer the electric field and produce a continuous gain...
Charged Particle detection in High-Energy Physics (HEP) applications increasingly asks for sensors with improved timing resolution and low power. A trade-off between these two requirements is typically necessary and strongly linked to the design and technology of front-end readout electronics. Low-Gain Avalanche Detectors (LGADs), which have become an established technology in HEP experiments,...
The ATLAS inner detector will be completely replaced to cope with the increased occupancy, bandwidth and radiation damage that will be posed by the High Luminosity phase of the Large Hadron Collider. The new all-silicon Inner Tracker (ITk) will be equipped with pixel detectors in the innermost part, using several silicon sensor technologies equipped with novel ASICs connected by bump-bonding...
The Mu3e experiment aims to detect charged lepton flavor violation through the
decay channel μ → e e e. With sensitivities of 10^−15 in its initial phase and
10^−16 in the final phase, it improves upon prior experiments by four orders of
magnitude. The innovative experimental concept is based on a tracking detector
built from novel ultra-thin silicon pixel sensors and scintillating fibres...
Precise tracking in space and time is becoming a more and more pivotal ingredient in designing high-energy physics experiments. Low-Gain Avalanche Diodes (LGADs) with an active thickness of $\sim$ 50 µm have proved the ability of silicon sensors to provide precise timing down to about 30 ps. At present, this timing performance is maintained almost unchanged up to a fluence of...
The High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) is expected to deliver an integrated luminosity of 3000 - 4000 fb$^{-1}$ after 10 years of operation with peak instantaneous luminosity reaching about 5 - 7.5 $\times10^{34}$cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$. During Long Shutdown 3, several components of the CMS detector will undergo major changes, called Phase-2 upgrade, to be able to operate in the challenging environment of...
The charge-integrating pixel detector is one of the major enablers of new science at X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) facilities. Such detector must revolve high dynamic range diffraction images resulting from interaction between the sample and ultra intense X-ray pulses with duration in order of femtosecond. Ideally, the frame rate of the detector should match the repetition rate of the laser...
The CERN proposed $e^+e^-$ Future Circular Collider (FCC-ee) is designed as an electroweak, flavour, Higgs and top factory with unprecedented luminosities. Many measurements at the FCC-ee will rely on the precise determination of the vertices, measured by dedicated vertex detectors.
All vertex detector designs use Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) with a single-hit resolution of ≈3 µm...
Belle II ugpgrade is expected around 2028 to mitigate the high background induced by electron and positron beams. We have invented a new pixel detector concept named Dual Timer Pixel (DuTiP) for the vertex detector upgrade. This pixel detector concept can be also used for the layer 7 and 8 of the ILD vertex detector. The first prototype was fabricated with lapis semiconductor 200 nm FD-SOI...
HEPS-BPIX4 is a new engineering generation hybrid pixel detector prototype with 6M pixels with 140μm×140μm following the previous one with a pixel size of 150um×150um and frame rate up to 1.2kHz at 20-bit dynamic range. The 6M pixel detector is design for the Biological macromolecule experiment station of HEPS(BA beamline), which will be operational by 2025. The BPIX chip, fabricated in a...
Recent advancements in silicon sensor technology have paved the way for the development of high-resolution 4D-tracking detectors capable of simultaneously measuring the position and time of passage of charged particles within a single sensitive device. A key approach is the use of resistive read-out in thin Low Gain Avalanche Diode (LGAD) sensors, which introduces combined intrinsic signal...
High voltage CMOS pixel sensors are proposed in many future particle physics experiments such as the HL-LHC upgrades and future circular colliders. The ATLASPIX3 chip consists of 49000 pixels of dimension 50μm x 150 μm, realised in in TSI 180nm HVCMOS technology. It was the first full reticle size monolithic HVCMOS sensor suitable for construction of multi-chip modules and supporting serial...
Monolithic active pixel sensors (MAPS) integrating sensitive element and readout circuits into one silicon chip have proven their good performance as high spatial resolution particle trackers in the past years. The MAPS provides high granularity with low material budget and has been applicated in high energy physical experiments, such as MIMOSA sensors for the STAR HFT at RICH, ALPIDE sensors...
The Micro Vertex Detector (MVD) is the first downstream detector of the fixed-target CBM experiment at the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR). It enables high-precision tracking of low-momentum particles in direct proximity of the target, e.g., the first out of four planar stations is placed only 8 cm downstream the interaction point. Thus, minimizing the material budget...
The Inner Tracking System (ITS) of the ALICE experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor technology application in high-energy physics.
The updated version of the tracking system, called ITS2, consists of seven concentric layers of ALPIDE monolithic active pixel sensors produced in the 180 nm CMOS process, covering a total sensitive area of...
Recent advancements in particle physics demand pixel detectors that can withstand increased energy and luminosity in the future collider experiments. In response, MALTA, a novel monolithic active pixel detector, has been developed with a cutting-edge readout architecture. This new class of monolithic pixel detectors is found to have exceptional radiation tolerance, superior hit rates, higher...
Using the CENPA Tandem accelerator at the University of Washington, we studied the response of low gain avalanche detectors (LGADs) to MeV-range deposits from a proton beam. LGADs are thin silicon detectors with moderate internal signal amplification. This type of devices is prone to a gain suppression mechanism, which is the topic of this study, especially for large energy depositions....
With the next upgrade of the ALICE inner tracking system (ITS3) as its primary focus, a set of small MAPS test chips have been developed in the 65 nm TPSCo CMOS process. The Circuit Exploratoire 65 nm (CE-65) focuses on the important characterisation of the analogue charge collection properties of this technology. The latest iteration of sensor design in this line of development is CE-65v2,...
Monolithic active pixel sensors with depleted substrates present a promising option for pixel detectors in high-radiation environments. Leveraging high-resistivity silicon substrates and high bias voltages in commercial CMOS technologies facilitates depletion of the charge sensitive volume. This enhances the radiation tolerance and charge collection capabilities to meet the demands of such...
Silicon strip detectors developed for the Inner Tracker (ITk) of the ATLAS experiment will operate in a harsh radiation environment of the HL-LHC accelerator. The ITk is thus designed to endure a total fluence of 1.6×1015 1 MeV neq/cm2 and a total ionizing dose (TID) of 66 Mrad in the strip detector region. A radiation-hard n⁺-in-p technology is implemented in the ITk strip sensors. To achieve...
During the Long Shutdown 2 (LS2), the ALICE Inner Tracking System was upgraded to its second version ITS2, consisting of 7 layers of silicon CMOS Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors, the ALICE Pixel Detectors (ALPIDE MAPS). Thanks to the integrated read-out circuitry, ALPIDE MAPS thickness in terms of radiation length X₀ has already been reduced to 0.36%X₀ per layer in ITS2, but this could be...
Due to their advantages of fast readout rate, high integration and low power consumption of CMOS image sensors, they have been widely used in medical imaging, security monitoring, and space X-ray detection. As an important part of CMOS image sensors, the performance of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) directly affects the quality of imaging. In large-area and high-speed CMOS image sensors,...
In this presentation we will show results from our comprehensive study on inter-pixel region in trench-isolated Low Gain Avalanche Detectors. The focus will be on recently observed atypical self-induced signals with extremely large amplitude that are also very extended in time. We will be comparing the results from study on Trenched LGADs with results from study on Trenched PINs. We will be...
X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) facilities can delivery femtosecond X-ray pulses with ultra-high peak brightness, which in turn calls for high performance integrating type pixel detectors. State-of-the-art pixel read chips for detectors commissioning at XFEL facilities usually employ amplifiers with multi-gain stages within the pixel to reach high dynamic range, typically from 1 to 10$^4$...
During the last years, the need for innovative technologies that allows to enhance performance of particle tracking detectors has become a very important point. New sensor technologies play a key role in detector R&D, focusing the development on increased radiation hardness, improved timing and space resolution.
Among the currently developed sensor technologies, the 3D silicon sensor has...
The impact of radiation on Si-based detectors has garnered interest due to the observed degradation in their stability in high-radiation environments. In this study, we examined the effects of 1 MeV neutron-irradiation at different fluences on the electrical properties of undoped n-Si diodes using current-voltage (I-V) technique. The irradiation fluences ranged from 0 to 1017 n/cm2. The...
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is one of the four main experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and it is mainly designed to study heavy-ion collisions at ultra-relativistic energies. In view of the LHC Run 4, foreseen to start in 2029, ALICE will replace the three innermost cylindrical layers of its current inner tracking system (ITS2) during the Long Shutdown 3...
The adoption of monolithic active pixel sensors (MAPS) in CMOS technologies for high-energy physics experiments was a breakthrough. These pixel detectors can achieve a material budget as low as 0.1% of the radiation length per layer, as they integrate the readout electronics within the sensor itself.
After the successful installation of the ITS2 detector, covering 10 m² with MAPS, a further...
Monolithic CMOS sensors combine the sensing volume and the processing electronics in the same die, leading to complex shapes of doped regions with various concentrations. As a consequence, the electric field in such sensors cannot be accurately expressed analytically. Considering the importance of the charge propagation process on the signal formation in the pixels, the electric field is...
The TaichuPix chip is a dedicated monolithic CMOS pixel sensor developed for the first 6-layer silicon vertex detector prototype for the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) vertex detector R&D. Two small-scale demonstrator chips (25 mm$^2$) had been designed to optimize the in-pixel circuit and readout architecture, and to verify the radiation hardness. The promising test results of the...
The LHC will undergo an upgrade known as the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), with the aim of delivering 3000 fb-1. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector will be upgraded during the Phase-II upgrade to profit from the increased luminosity delivered by HL-LHC. As a part of the Phase-II upgrade, the CMS tracking detector will be replaced. In the regions closest to the beam, the Phase-II Inner...
This work presents a novel, patent-pending solution for the packaging of ALPIDE chips that facilitates non-planar assembly with a minimal material budget. This solution represents an advancement based on methodologies developed for the ALICE ITS1 and the STAR tracker two decades ago. The core of this approach involves the use of flexible cables composed of aluminum and polyimide, with...
The Mu3e experiment searches for the lepton flavour violating decay µ→ eee with an ultimate aimed sensitivity of 1 event in 10^16 decays in phase 2. This goal can only be achieved by reducing the material budget per tracking layer to X/X0 ≈ 0.1 %. For this purpose, gaseous helium is chosen as coolant, while High-Voltage Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (HV-MAPS) thinned to 50 µm constitute the...
