Laboratory and beam-test performance study of a 55$~\mu$m pitch iLGAD sensor bonded to a Timepix3 readout chip

TL;DR

This study evaluates a 55μm pitch iLGAD sensor bonded to a Timepix3 chip, demonstrating uniform gain, excellent timing resolution, and potential for high-resolution X-ray detection through extensive laboratory and beam tests.

Contribution

It presents the first detailed performance characterization of a large-area, small-pitch iLGAD sensor bonded to a Timepix3 chip, highlighting improvements in gain uniformity and timing performance.

Findings

Gain of around 5 with very good uniformity

Hit time resolution down to 1.3 ns

X-ray energy resolution up to 4.5 keV

Abstract

This contribution reports on characterisation results of a large-area (2$~\mathrm{cm}^2$) small pitch (55$~\mu$m) inverse Low-Gain Avalanche Detector (iLGAD), bonded to a Timepix3 readout chip. The ilGAD sensors were produced by Micron Semiconductor Ltd with the goal to obtain good gain uniformity and maximise the fill-factor -- an issue present with standard small-pitch LGAD designs. We have conducted detailed performance evaluations using both X-ray calibrations and beam tests. An X-ray fluorescence setup has been used to obtain energy calibration and to identify the optimal operating settings of the new devices, whereas the extensive beam tests allowed for a detailed evaluation of the detector performance. The beam-tests were performed at the CERN SPS North Area H6 beamline, using a 120 GeV/c pion beam. The reference tracking and time-stamping is achieved by a Timepix3-based beam telescope setup. The results show a gain of around 5 with very good uniformity, measured across the whole gain area, as well as a hit time resolution down to 1.3 ns without correcting for the time-walk effects. Furthermore, it is shown that the gain opens the possibility of a good X-ray energy resolution down to 4.5 keV.