Investigation of sapphire detector designed for single particle detection

For beam halo and beam loss monitoring systems at accelerators extremely radiation hard sensors are needed. Single crystal sapphire is a promising material. Industrially grown sapphire wafers are available in large sizes, are low in cost and can be operated at room temperature. Currently sapphire sensors are used for a beam-loss monitor at FLASH,detecting bunches of particles crossing the sensors simultaneously. Here we present a multichannel detector designed for single minimum ionising particle detection using a stack of sapphire plates. The performance of the detector was studied in a 5 GeV electron beam at DESY-II. The detector was operated together with the EUDET beam telescope, which allowed the reconstruction of the position of the hits at the detector. For each sapphire plate the charge collection efficiency was measured as a function of the bias voltage and the signal size as a function of the hit position with respect to the metal electrodes. The data confirms that mainly electrons contribute to the signal. Based on these results the next generation sapphire detector will be designed.