Monitoring radiation damage in the ATLAS pixel detector

Radiation hardness is one of the most important features of the ATLAS pixel detector in order to ensure a good performance and a long lifetime. Monitoring of radiation damage is crucial in order to assess and predict the expected performance of the detector. Key values for the assessment of radiation damage in silicon, such as the depletion voltage and depletion depth in the sensors, are measured on a regular basis during operations. This thesis summarises the monitoring program that is conducted in order to assess the impact of radiation damage and compares it to model predictions. In addition, the physics performance of the ATLAS detector highly depends on the amount of disabled modules in the ATLAS pixel detector. A worrying amount of module failures was observed during run I. Thus it was decided to recover repairable modules during the long shutdown (LS1) by extracting the pixel detector. The impact of the module repairs and module failures on the detector performance is analysed in this thesis.