Radiation-hard hybrid superconducting pixel detector

Recently, a new position-sensitive cryogenic detector for out-of-magnetic-field high-energy particle tracking has been proposed. This consists of a semiconductive substrate to transduce the energy of particles in charge and of a current-driven Josephson-Tunnel Junction-based sample and hold circuit. The main interest in such a device consists in the extreme radiation hardness of the Josephson readout circuitry. Moreover, these circuits offer unique performances in terms of speed and power dissipation. Using radiation-hard semiconductive transducers the entire detector is expected to safely survive a dose of one Gigarad.