Study of Straggling and Extreme Cases of Energy Deposition in Micron Scale Silicon Volumes using the DEPFET Detector

The Depleted P-channel Field-Effect Transistor detector is a pixel detector type currently under development. In high energy physics, pixel detectors measure space points along the trajectory of charged particles. They determine the spatial position by measuring the charges created as a result of interactions with the passing particle. Thus the detector’s signals can be used to determine the energy deposited by the particle in single pixels of a pixel matrix. The development of a new detector raises the question whether our simulation models can accurately describe the physical processes – like ionisation and scattering – taking place during operation. The thesis aims to validate one of the current Monte-Carlo simulations (based on the Geant4 simulation package) of high energy straggling processes using experimental data of a test beam run of DEPFET modules. This is done by calculating the spatial distribution of the electron/hole pairs created in extreme cases of ionisation and using this distribution for comparison and analysis of the data samples.