MONOLITHIC CMOS PIXELS FOR CHARGED PARTICLE TRACKING

The increasing need of high performance flavour tagging capabilities in particle physics experiments has triggered the development of a novel - fully integrated - silicon pixel detector, called Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor. The first MAPS prototypes adapted to the detection of minimum ionising particles (mip) were designed and fabricated in standard CMOS technology. Their first tests demonstrate that the sensors detect mips with high signal-to-noise ratio, detection efficiency close to 100% and provide excellent spatial resolution. The main aspects of these results are summarised in this paper, together with preliminary results on the radiation hardness of MAPS. An outlook on the R&D started to adapt and integrate the sensors for future vertex detectors is also provided.