Modeling Radiation Damage to Pixel Sensors in the ATLAS Detector

Silicon pixel detectors are at the core of the current and planned upgrade of the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). As the closest detector component to the interaction point, these detectors will be subjected to a significant amount of radiation over their lifetime: prior to the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), the innermost layers will receive a fluence in excess of $10^{15} n_{eq}/cm^2$ and the HL-HLC detector upgrades must cope with an order of magnitude higher fluence integrated over their lifetimes. Simulating radiation damage is critical in order to make accurate predictions for current future detector performance that will enable searches for new particles and forces as well as precision measurements of Standard Model particles such as the Higgs boson. We present a digitization model that includes radiation damage effects to the ATLAS pixel sensors for the first time. In addition to thoroughly describing the setup, we present first predictions for basic pixel cluster properties alongside early studies with LHC Run 2 proton-proton collision data.