The ALICE Inner Tracking System Upgrade

A central component of the ALICE Upgrade will be a completely new Inner Tracking System (ITS). The performance of the new ITS will be a significant improvement over that of the present ITS, in particular in the areas of material budget, granularity, a reduced radial distance from the first layer to the beam and rate capability. This will enable many key measurements of the properties of the quark-gluon plasma to be performed, in particular with rare probes such as low momentum charm and beauty mesons and baryons.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of Quark Matter 2012, The XXIII International Conference on Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions, August 13-18, 2012, Washington D.C., US

Pixel Detectors

Pixel detectors for precise particle tracking in high energy physics have been developed to a level of maturity during the past decade. Three of the LHC detectors will use vertex detectors close to the interaction point based on the hybrid pixel technology which can be considered the state of the art in this field of instrumentation. A development period of almost 10 years has resulted in pixel detector modules which can stand the extreme rate and timing requirements as well as the very harsh radiation environment at the LHC without severe compromises in performance. From these developments a number of different applications have spun off, most notably for biomedical imaging. Beyond hybrid pixels, a number of monolithic or semi-monolithic developments, which do not require complicated hybridization but come as single sensor/IC entities, have appeared and are currently developed to greater maturity. Most advanced in terms of maturity are so called CMOS active pixels and DEPFET pixels. The present state in the construction of the hybrid pixel detectors for the LHC experiments together with some hybrid pixel detector spin-off is reviewed. In addition, new developments in monolithic or semi-monolithic pixel devices are summarized.Comment: 14 pages, 38 drawings/photographs in 21 figure

Upgrade of the ALICE Inner Tracking System

The Inner Tracking System (ITS) is the key ALICE detector for the study of heavy flavour production at LHC. Heavy flavor can be studied via the identification of short-lived hadrons containing heavy quarks which have a mean proper decay length in the order of 100-300 $\mu$m. To accomplish this task, the ITS is composed of six cylindrical layers of silicon detectors (two pixel, two drift and two strip) with a radial coverage from 3.9 to 43 cm and a material budget of 1.1% X0 per layer. %In particular, the properties of the two innermost layers define the ITS performance in measuring the displaced vertex of such short-lived particles. In order to enhance the ALICE physics capabilities, and, in particular, the tracking performance for heavy-flavour detection, the possibility of an ITS upgrade has been studied in great detail. It will make use of the spectacular progress made in the field of imaging sensors over the last ten years as well as the possibility to install a smaller radius beampipe. The upgraded detector will have greatly improved features in terms of: the impact parameter resolution, standalone tracking efficiency at low $p_{t}$, momentum resolution and readout capabilities. The Conceptual Design Report, which covers the design and performance requirements, the upgrade options, as well as the necessary R&D efforts, was made public in September 2012. An intensive R&D program has been launched to review the different technological options under consideration. The new detector should be ready to be installed during the long LHC shutdown period scheduled in 2017-2018.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures PIXEL2012 - International Workshop on Semiconductor Pixel Detectors for Particles and Imagin

A review of advances in pixel detectors for experiments with high rate and radiation

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments ATLAS and CMS have established hybrid pixel detectors as the instrument of choice for particle tracking and vertexing in high rate and radiation environments, as they operate close to the LHC interaction points. With the High Luminosity-LHC upgrade now in sight, for which the tracking detectors will be completely replaced, new generations of pixel detectors are being devised. They have to address enormous challenges in terms of data throughput and radiation levels, ionizing and non-ionizing, that harm the sensing and readout parts of pixel detectors alike. Advances in microelectronics and microprocessing technologies now enable large scale detector designs with unprecedented performance in measurement precision (space and time), radiation hard sensors and readout chips, hybridization techniques, lightweight supports, and fully monolithic approaches to meet these challenges. This paper reviews the world-wide effort on these developments.Comment: 84 pages with 46 figures. Review article.For submission to Rep. Prog. Phy

The STAR MAPS-based PiXeL detector

The PiXeL detector (PXL) for the Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT) of the STAR experiment at RHIC is the first application of the state-of-the-art thin Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) technology in a collider environment. Custom built pixel sensors, their readout electronics and the detector mechanical structure are described in detail. Selected detector design aspects and production steps are presented. The detector operations during the three years of data taking (2014-2016) and the overall performance exceeding the design specifications are discussed in the conclusive sections of this paper

Silicon Sensors for Trackers at High-Luminosity Environment

The planned upgrade of the LHC accelerator at CERN, namely the high luminosity (HL) phase of the LHC (HL-LHC foreseen for 2023), will result in a more intense radiation environment than the present tracking system was designed for. The required upgrade of the all-silicon central trackers at the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments will include higher granularity and radiation hard sensors. The radiation hardness of the new sensors must be roughly an order of magnitude higher than the one of LHC detectors. To address this, a massive R&D program is underway within the CERN RD50 collaboration "Development of Radiation Hard Semiconductor Devices for Very High Luminosity Colliders" to develop silicon sensors with sufficient radiation tolerance. Research topics include the improvement of the intrinsic radiation tolerance of the sensor material and novel detector designs with benefits like reduced trapping probability (thinned and 3D sensors), maximized sensitive area (active edge sensors) and enhanced charge carrier generation (sensors with intrinsic gain). A review of the recent results from both measurements and TCAD simulations of several detector technologies and silicon materials at radiation levels expected for HL-LHC will be presented.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures, 10th International Conference on Radiation Effects on Semiconductor Materials, Detectors and Devices (RESMDD14), 8-10 October, Firenze, Ital

EUDAQ - A data acquisition software framework for common beam telescopes

EUDAQ is a generic data acquisition software developed for use in conjunction with common beam telescopes at charged particle beam lines. Providing high-precision reference tracks for performance studies of new sensors, beam telescopes are essential for the research and development towards future detectors for high-energy physics. As beam time is a highly limited resource, EUDAQ has been designed with reliability and ease-of-use in mind. It enables flexible integration of different independent devices under test via their specific data acquisition systems into a top-level framework. EUDAQ controls all components globally, handles the data flow centrally and synchronises and records the data streams. Over the past decade, EUDAQ has been deployed as part of a wide range of successful test beam campaigns and detector development applications

Performance of ALICE AD modules in the CERN PS test beam

Two modules of the AD detector have been studied with the test beam at the T10 facility at CERN. The AD detector is made of scintillator pads read out by wave-length shifters (WLS) coupled to clean fibres that carry the produced light to photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs). In ALICE the AD is used to trigger and study the physics of diffractive and ultra-peripheral collisions as well as for a variety of technical tasks like beam-gas background monitoring or as a luminometer. The position dependence of the modules' efficiency has been measured and the effect of hits on the WLS or PMTs has been evaluated. The charge deposited by pions and protons has been measured at different momenta of the test beam. The time resolution is determined as a function of the deposited charge. These results are important ingredients to better understand the AD detector, to benchmark the corresponding simulations, and very importantly they served as a baseline for a similar device, the Forward Diffractive Detector (FDD), being currently built and that will be in operation in ALICE during the LHC Runs 3 and 4.Peer reviewe