Characterization of 3D Silicon Pixel Detectors for the ATLAS ITk

After ten years of massive success, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is going for an upgrade to the next phase, The High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) which is planned to start its operation in 2029. This is expected to have a fine boost to its performance, with an instantaneous luminosity of 5.0×1034 cm-2s -1 (ultimate value 7.5×1034 cm-2s -1 ) with 200 average interactions per bunch crossing which will increase the fluences up to more than 1016 neq/ cm2 , resulting in high radiation damage in ATLAS detector. To withstand this situation, it was proposed to make the innermost layer with 3D silicon sensors, which will have radiation tolerance up to 2×1016 neq/cm2 with a Total Ionization Dose of 9.9 MGy. Two-pixel geometries have been selected for 3D sensors, 50 × 50 µm2 for Endcap (ring), which will be produced by FBK (Italy) and SINTEF (Norway), and 25 × 100 µm2 for Barrel (stave), will be produced by CNM (Spain). A discussion is made in this thesis about the production of FBK on both geometries, as they have made a breakthrough with their Stepper lithography process. The yield improved, specifically for the geometry 25 × 100 µm2 with two electrode readouts, which was problematic in the mask aligner approach. Their sensors were characterized electrically at waferlevel as well as after integration with RD53a readout chip (RoC) on single-chip cards (SCC) and were verified against Innermost Tracker criteria. The SCCs were sent for irradiation up to 1×1016 neq/cm2 and were tested under electron test beam, and a hit efficiency of 97% was presented. Some more SCCs have been sent to Los Alamos for irradiating them up to 1.5×1016 neq/cm2 fluence. As the 3D sensors will be mounted as Triplets, a discussion is also made on their assembly and QA/QC process. A reception testing and electrical testing setup both at room temperature and the cold temperature was made and discussed, with results from some early RD53a RoC-based triplets. The pre-production sensors are already evaluated, and soon they will be available bump-bonded with ITkPixV1 RoC for further testing.