Status and future of the ATLAS Pixel Detector at the LHC

The ATLAS Pixel Detector is the innermost detector of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The detector provides hermetic coverage with three cylindrical layers and three layers of disks in each forward end-cap. It consists of approximately 80 million pixels that are individually read out via chips bump-bonded to 1744 n-on-n silicon substrates. Intensive calibration, tuning, timing optimization and monitoring resulted in the successful five years of operation with good detector performance. The record breaking instantaneous luminosities of 7.7 × 10 33 cm − 2 s − 1 recently surpassed at the LHC generated a rapidly increasing particle fluence in the ATLAS Pixel Detector. As the radiation dose accumulated, the first effects of radiation damage became observable in the silicon sensors as an increase in the silicon leakage current and the change of the voltage required to fully deplete the sensor. A fourth pixel layer at a radius of 3.3 cm will be added during the long shutdown (2013–2014) together with the replacement of pixel services. A letter of intent was submitted for a completely new Pixel Detector after 2023, capable to take data with extremely high leveled luminosities of 5 × 10 34 cm − 2 s − 1 at the high luminosity LHC.