Speaker
Description
Since the spatial density of particle collisions is expected to rise significantly in the upcoming high-energy physics experiments, silicon detectors are required to provide precise timing information to perform an accurate track reconstruction and particle identification. Several experiments will face this challenge, including the next-generation heavy-ion experiment named ALICE 3, which will be installed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN during the Long Shutdown 4 (LS4).
In recent years, Monolithic CMOS Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) have proven to successfully meet the requirements of tracking detectors and also to be in several cases a reliable alternative to hybrid pixels. Monolithic sensors can indeed help to decrease the production costs and to simplify the complex assembly procedures.
Currently, the time resolution of CMOS sensors needs to be pushed significantly beyond the present state-of-art and a vigorous R&D is necessary to improve it. A promising solution to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and decrease the jitter has been found by implanting a gain layer below the collection electrode, thus providing charge multiplication by impact ionization.
To this aim, the last ARCADIA submission exploited the integration of the Low Gain Avalanche Diode (LGAD) concept in the design of fully depleted CMOS MAPS, combining the benefits of both technologies. The multiplication of the signals in MAPS has a major impact on the SNR, hence the jitter can be decreased and the power consumption of the in-pixel front-end can be lowered while maintaining the same performance. As well as possible applications in high energy physics experiments, this technology is attractive also for space applications where low power is desired.
This presentation will focus on the latest characterization results on these structures with internal gain fabricated in a standard 110 nm CMOS technology by LFoundry. An overview of these sensors will be provided, with emphasis on laboratory measurements and comparisons of experimental data with simulated ones. The promising results obtained from the analysis of the data collected during the latest two test beams at CERN PS and DESY, where a tracker was exploited to study the correlations with the particle tracks in the device, will be shown. Finally, the future perspectives and an insight into the ongoing R&D will be given.
