Monitoring the radiation damage of the ATLAS pixel detector

The pixel detector is the innermost charged particle tracking component employed by the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The instantaneous luminosity delivered by the LHC, now routinely in excess of 5 × 10 33 cm − 2 s − 1 , results in a rapidly increasing accumulated radiation dose to the detector. Methods based on the sensor depletion properties and leakage current are used to monitor the evolution of the radiation damage, and results from the 2011 run are presented.