Irradiation induced effects in the FE-I4 front-end chip of the ATLAS IBL detector

TL;DR

This paper investigates how radiation damage affects the FE-I4 front-end chip in the ATLAS IBL detector, analyzing current increases due to ionising radiation and providing operational guidelines.

Contribution

It presents experimental data on radiation-induced current increases in the FE-I4 chip and offers guidelines for detector operation under radiation exposure.

Findings

Current increase correlates with total-ionising dose

Radiation effects depend on temperature

Operational guidelines for radiation conditions

Abstract

The ATLAS Insertable B-Layer (IBL) detector was installed into the ATLAS experiment in 2014 and has been in operation since 2015. During the first year of IBL data taking an increase of the low voltage currents associated with the FE-I4 front-end chip was observed and this increase was traced back to the radiation damage in the chip. The dependence of the current on the total-ionising dose and temperature has been tested with X-ray and proton irradiations and will be presented in this paper together with the detector operation guidelines.