Development and characterization of a large area silicon pad array for an electromagnetic calorimeter

We present the research and development work of the first version of a 6×6 array of silicon pad detectors, carried out in India, for the proposed forward calorimeter (FOCAL) as part of the ALICE collaboration upgrade program at CERN. The primary motivation is to develop a large area silicon pad array realizing the challenging requirements of high-energy physics experiments such as low leakage current, high breakdown voltage and evaluate its performance as an active layer in the prototype silicon tungsten (Si-W) electromagnetic (EM) calorimeter. Towards these goals, a 36-pad silicon sensor with an individual pad size of ∼1 cm$^2$ is designed on a 4-inch high resistivity N-type wafer and fabricated at Bharat Electronics Limited, Bangalore. The sensors have been used to assemble the prototype Si-W calorimeters and were successfully tested with high-energy particle beams. The design and development of the large area silicon sensor and its characterization using radioactive sources in the laboratory and high-energy particle beams are reported in this paper.