Development of radiation hard sensors for very high luminosity colliders—CERN-RD50 project

The requirements at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN have pushed todayʹs silicon tracking detectors to the very edge of the current technology. Future very high luminosity colliders or a possible upgrade of the LHC to a 10 times increased luminosity of 1035 cm−2 s−1 will require semiconductor detectors with substantially improved properties. Considering the expected total fluences of fast hadrons above 1016 cm−2 and a possible reduced bunch-crossing interval of ≈10 ns, the detector must be ultra radiation hard, provide a fast and efficient charge collection and be as thin as possible. The newly formed CERN-RD50 project is aiming to provide detector technologies, which are able to operate safely and efficiently in such an environment. This article describes the approaches and first results of RD50 to develop ultra radiation hard sensors by optimizing existing methods and evaluating new ways to engineer the silicon bulk material, the detector structure and the detector operational conditions as well as investigating the possibility to use semiconductor materials other than silicon.