Development of radiation hard semiconductor sensors for charged particle tracking at very high luminosities

The RD50 collaboration (sponsored by the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN) has been exploring the development of radiation hard semiconductor devices for very high-luminosity colliders since 2002. The target fluence to qualify detectors set by the anticipated dose for the innermost tracking layers of the future upgrade of the CERN large hadron collider (LHC) is $10^{16}$ $1$ MeV neutron equivalent $(\rm{n}_{eq}) cm^{−2}$. This is much larger than typical fluences in space, but is mainly limited to displacement and total dose damage, without the single-event effects typical for the space environment. RD50 investigates radiation hardening from many angles, including: Search for alternative semiconductor to replace silicon, improvement of the intrinsic tolerance of the substrate material (p- vs. n-type, initial doping concentration, oxygen concentration), optimization of the readout geometry (collection of holes or electrons, surface treatment), novel detector designs (3D, edge-less, interconnects).