ATLAS Liquid Argon Endcap Calorimeter R and D for sLHC

The performance of the ATLAS liquid argon endcap has been studied for luminosities as expected for the operation at sLHC. The increase of integrated luminosity by a factor of ten has serious consequences for the signal reconstruction, radiation hardness requirements and operation of the forward liquid argon calorimeters. The response has been studied with small modules of the type as built for ATLAS in a very high intensity beam at IHEP/Protvino. The highest intensity obtained was well above the level of energy impact expected for ATLAS at sLHC. The signal processing of the ATLAS Hadronic Endcap Calorimeters employs the concept of 'active pads' which keeps the detector capacities at the input of the amplifiers small and thereby achieves a fast rise time of the signal. This concept is realized using highly integrated amplifier and summing chips in GaAs technology. With an increase of luminosity by a factor of ten the safety factor for the radiation hardness is essentially eliminated. Therefore new more radiation hard technologies have been studied: SiGe bipolar, Si CMOS FET and GaAs FET transistors have been irradiated with neutrons up to an integrated fluence of 2.2 x 10**16 n/cm**2. All technologies exceed the limit required for the radiation hardness for the operation at sLHC of 2 x 10**15 n/cm**2. The temperature dependence of the gain has been studied as well. Here the bipolar technologies - in contrast to CMOS - need an ad justment of the operation point when going from room temperature to liquid nitrogen temperature.