Köln 2025 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 24: Invited Talks I

HK 24.3: Hauptvortrag

Mittwoch, 12. März 2025, 12:00–12:30, Kurt-Alder HS Chemie

Precision redefined: Unlocking new frontiers with Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors — •Bogdan-Mihail Blidaru for the ALICE Germany collaboration — GSI Helmholtzzentrum, Darmstadt

CMOS Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) have emerged as key-enabling detector technologies for heavy-ion experiments, meeting the stringent requirements of high granularity, low mass, excellent spatial resolution, and robust radiation tolerance demanded by these high-density collision environments. Several variations of MAPS developed using mainstream CMOS imaging technologies have been or are successfully being used in experiments (STAR, ALICE ITS2), while some are planned for current and future upgrades (ITS3, ALICE3, Belle2, CBM, LHCb trackers, mu3e), and even prospective FCC-ee detectors.

The recent shift to deeper submicron nodes enhances integration density and enables larger wafer sizes. Alongside process modifications this allows CMOS MAPS to be competitive in terms of radiation hardness with their hybrid counterparts. Moreover, with sensitive layers only few tens of microns thick, the sensors can be thinned even below 50µm, at which point they become flexible enough to be bent into truly cylindrical shapes with radii as small as 2 cm. Combined with processing options such as stitching, this added flexibility allows fabrication of entire detector half-cylinders from a single sensor, substantially reducing support structures and overall material budget. These developments pave the way toward near-massless detector concepts.

This contribution offers an overview of some emerging CMOS MAPS technologies and their applications in heavy-ion physics.

Keywords: MAPS; ITS3; ALICE 3; CMOS; sensors