Superior radiation tolerance of thin epitaxial silicon detectors

For the LHC upgrade (fluences up to 10**1**6 p/cm**2) epi-Si devices are shown to be a viable solution. No type inversion was measured up to 1.3 multiplied by 10**1**524 GeV/c protons/cm**2 and the charge collection efficiency (CCE) remained close to 100%. For reactor neutrons CCE was measured to be 60% at 8 multiplied by 10**1**5 n/cm **2. Annealing measurements have shown that only moderate cooling during beam off periods would be necessary. As a tentative explanation for the superior quality of these devices, we assume that radiation-induced donor generation leads to compensation effects of deep acceptors. In the future, we will extend the experiments to fluences up to 10**1**6 p/cm**2 and use also different variants of the epi-Si material and device geometry.