High rate particle tracking and ultra-fast timing with a thin hybrid silicon pixel detector

The Gigatracker (GTK) is a hybrid silicon pixel detector designed for the NA62 experiment at CERN. The beam spectrometer, made of three GTK stations, has to sustain high and non-uniform particle rate (~1GHz in total) and measure momentum and angles of each beam track with a combined time resolution of 150ps. In order to reduce multiple scattering and hadronic interactions of beam particles, the material budget of a single GTK station has been fixed to 0.5% X_0. The expected fluence for 100 days of running is 2x10^1^4 1MeVn_e_q/cm^2, comparable to the one foreseen in the inner trackers of LHC detectors during 10 years of operation. To comply with these requirements, an efficient and very low-mass (<0.15%X_0) cooling system is being constructed, using a novel microchannel cooling silicon plate. Two complementary read-out architectures have been produced as small-scale prototypes: one is based on a Time-over-Threshold circuit followed by a TDC shared by a group of pixels, while the other makes use of a constant-fraction discriminator followed by an on-pixel TDC. The read-out ASICs are produced in 130nm IBM CMOS technology and will be thinned down to 100@mm or less. An overview of the Gigatracker detector system will be presented. Experimental results from laboratory and beam tests of prototype bump-bonded assemblies will be described as well. These results show a time resolution of about 170ps for single hits from minimum ionizing particles, using 200@mm thick silicon sensors.