First Beam Test Characterisation of a 3D-stc Silicon Short Strip Detector

The planned upgrade to the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the Super-LHC (sLHC) will increase its luminosity by a factor of ten. This necessitates the development of silicon tracking detectors that are significantly more radiation resistant than the ones employed at the LHC. Currently, new detector technologies are being developed to cope with the increased levels of radiation damage at the sLHC. A possible radiation hard option for silicon short strip devices (SSD) in the inner layers of sLHC trackers are 3-D detectors with rows of columnar electrodes processed into the bulk material. These are joined together to form strips. While the excellent radiation hardness of this design has been proven before in lab experiments, a 3-D SSD prototype has now been investigated for the first time in a beam test with pions of a nominal energy of 180 GeV. The use of analog LHC-speed electronics, a beam telescope and time-resolved measurements allowed for detailed studies of the signal behavior on the hit strip and its neighboring strips. Charge collection and efficiency were as well measured with respect to time and point of incidence of the beam particles on the detector. The results of these measurements are presented in this paper.