The impact of incorporating shell-corrections to energy loss in silicon

Abstract

Modern silicon tracking detectors based on hybrid or fully integrated CMOS technology are continuing to push to thinner sensors. The ionization energy loss fluctuations in very thin silicon sensors significantly deviates from the Landau distribution. Therefore, we have developed a charge deposition setup that implements the Bichsel straggling function, which accounts for shell-effects. This enhanced simulation is important for comparing with testbeam or collision data with thin sensors as demonstrated by reproducing more realistically the degraded position resolution compared with naïve ionization models based on simple Landau-like fluctuation. Our implementation of the Bichsel model agrees well with the multipurpose photo absorption ionization (PAI) model in Geant4 and is significantly faster. The code is made publicly available as part of the Allpix software package in order to facilitate predictions for new detector designs and comparisons with testbeam data.