The RD50 Experiment


Phil Allport, Matt Baca, Daniel Briglin, James Broughton, John Cotterill, Laura Gonella, Paul Newman, Kostas Nikolopoulos, Tony Price, Simon Pyatt
Cyclotron at Birmingham

RD50 is the CERN R&D collaboration devoted to radiation-hard semiconductor devices for very high luminosity colliders. It has 347 members and 60 participating institutes from 4 continents. The Birmingham Group includes one of the founder members (Allport) and is primarily involved in both the characterisation of radiation damage to high resistivity bulk p-type detectors for the HL-LHC tracker and development of Depleted Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (DMAPS) for possible use in ATLAS at HL-LHC, for future hadron or electron-hadron colliders and for applications in hadron radiotherapy. Key to the groups contribution are the assembly and testing facilities of the Birmingham Instrumentation laboratory for Particle physics and Applications (BILPA) and the UK's only AIDA-2020 Transnational Access Irradiation Facility, the MC40 cyclotron.

Birmingham have contributed to many aspects of the irradiation of planar p-type silicon (strip and pixel) and DMAPS devices. Read-out facilities include the ALiBaVa system for source tests of irradiated wire-bondable sensors, an edge-TCT system for charge collection profiles, read-out set-ups for both the CERN/ATLAS and RAL-TD designed DMAPS developments and a full suite of ATLAS ITk strip module DAQ. Irradiations up to HL-LHC doses can be achieved in minutes to hours depending on the size of the sample to be scanned in the MC40 proton beam and the permissible beam current. Irradiations take place at down to -50oC to minimise annealing and self-heating effects and can be carried out with devices powered, clocked or fully read out during irradiation.