Speaker
Description
During LHC LS3, ALICE plans to replace its innermost tracking layers with a new detector that is based on wafer-scale Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors, fabricated in 65 nm on 300 mm wafers. These sensors will be thinned down to 20-40 μm, a thickness such that they become flexible enough to be shaped into half cylinders. This will allow to place them very close to the beam pipe, at a distance of only 18 mm away from the interaction point. In addition, no supporting material – neither for powering, nor for cooling and data transmission – will be necessary due to a fully monolithic integration of the full stave-length into a single chip. The resulting arrangement features an unprecedented material-budget value of below 0.05% X0 per layer and will directly and substantially enhance the physics programme of ALICE.
This contribution will review the detector concept, the physics motivations, and lays out the R&D path. The R&D phase of the project has recently been endorsed by the Large Hadron Collider Committee, and was launched in December 2019.
