New detector concepts and developments for the sLHC

Abstract

It has been proposed to increase the luminosity of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN by an order of magnitude, with the upgraded machine dubbed Super-LHC. The ATLAS experiment will require a new tracker for this high luminosity operation due to radiation damage and track occupancy. In order to cope with the order of magnitude increase in pile-up backgrounds at the higher luminosity, an all silicon tracker is being designed. The new strip detector will use significantly shorter strips than the current silicon tracker in order to minimize the occupancy, while smaller pixel sizes are proposed for the an enlarged pixel detector. The tracker will be exposed to an increase in radiation dose corresponding to the luminosity increase and as such a new generation of extremely radiation hard silicon detectors is required. An R&D programme is underway to develop silicon sensors with sufficient radiation hardness; including 3D pixel and p-type strip detectors. The challenges and developments of these sensors are discussed.