Performance And Radiation Hardness Of The Atlas/sct Detector Module

The ATLAS experiment is a general purpose experiment being constructed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at FERN, Geneva. ATLAS is designed to exploit the full physics potential of LHC, in particular to study topics concerning the Higgs mechanism, Super-symmetry and CP violation. The cross sections for the processes under study are extremely small, requiring very high luminosity colliding beams. The Semiconductor Tracker (SCT) is an essential part of the Inner Detector tracking system of ATLAS. The active elements of the SCT is 4088 detector modules, tiled on four barrel cylinders and eighteen endcap disks. As a consequence of the high luminosity, the detector modules will operate in a harsh radiation environment. This thesis describes work concerning radiation hardness, beam test performance and methods for production testing of detector modules. The radiation hardness studies have been focused on the electrical performance of the front-end ASIC and the detector module. The results have identified features of the ASIC failing after irradiation and confirmed the good performance of the re-designed ASIC. The beam tests have been performed in the late prototyping and the pre- production phase, verifying the specified performance of the detector modules. Special effort have been made to evaluate the performance of irradiated detector modules. The assembly, quality assurance and characterisation of the detector modules will be done in the collaborating institutes. The thesis reports on methods developed for use during the production, to assess the electrical performance.