Development of Silicon Detectors for the High Luminosity LHC

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will be upgraded to a High Luminosity LHC in the year 2022, increasing the instantaneous luminosity by a factor of five. This will have major impacts on the experiments at the LHC, such as the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, and especially for their inner silicon tracking systems. Among other things, the silicon sensors used therein will be exposed to unprecedented levels of radiation damage, necessitating a replacement of the entire tracking detector. In order to maintain the excellent current performance, a new tracking detector has to be equipped with sensors of increased radiation hardness and higher granularity. The CMS experiment is undertaking an extensive R and D campaign in the search for the future silicon sensor technology baseline to be used in this upgrade. This thesis presents two methods suitable for use in this search: finite element TCAD simulations and test beam measurements. The simulations are focussed on the interstrip capacitance between sensor strips and are compared to measurements before and after the inclusion of radiation damage effects. A geometrical representation of the strip sensors used in the campaign has been found, establishing the predictive power of simulations. The test beam measurements make use of the high-precision pixel telescopes available at the DESY-II test beam facility. The performance of these telescopes has been assessed and their achievable pointing resolution has been found to be below 2 μm. Thin, epitaxial silicon is a candidate material for usage in radiation hard sensors for the future CMS tracking detector. Sample strip sensors of this material have been irradiated to fluences of up to 1.3 x 10¹⁶ n_eq/cm² with 800 MeV or 23 GeV protons. Test beam measurements with 5 GeV electrons have been performed to investigate the radiation hardness of epitaxial sensors using the pixel beam telescopes. The epitaxial device under test (DUT) has been integrated into the telescope and its software analysis framework. An alignment of DUT and telescope planes has been performed and traversing particle tracks reconstructed for the sensor analysis. Results show that the achievable resolution in the epitaxial silicon strip sensors is at the binary level. The measured charge collection efficiency for p-bulk sensors amounts to 80% of pre-irradiation levels for fluences of 3 x 10¹⁵ n_eq/cm² and to over 65% for Φ = 1.3 x 10¹⁶ n_eq/cm². Signal-to-noise levels at these fluence levels are 7.4 and 3.8, respectively. With particle tracks of various inclinations, the sharing of charge between sensor strips is investigated. Indications of possible charge losses at the sensor surface are described and evidence of commencing charge multiplication effects is presented. Sensors are also compared to thicker, non epitaxial sensors irradiated to the same fluence. From the obtained results, acquired from the first test beam measurements of irradiated epitaxial sensors ever performed, a complete picture of this material has been gained. It can be concluded that thin, p-bulk epitaxial silicon is sufficiently radiation hard for usage as an outer pixel detector sensor material.