Annihilation of low energy antiprotons in silicon sensors

The aim of the AEg̅IS experiment is to measure the gravitational acceleration for anti-hydrogen in the Earth´s gravitational field, thus testing the Weak Equivalence Principle, which states that all bodies fall with the same acceleration independent of their mass and composition. AEg̅IS will make use of a gravity module which includes a silicon detector, in order to measure the deflection of anti-hydrogen from a straight path due to the Earth´s gravitational field, by detecting the annihilation position on its surface. A position resolution better than 10 μm is required to determine the gravitational acceleration with a precision better than 10%. The work presented here is part of a study of different silicon sensor technologies to realise a silicon anti-hydrogen detector for the AEg̅IS experiment at CERN. We here focus on the study of a 3D pixel sensor with FE-I4 readout, originally designed for the ATLAS detector at the LHC, and compare it to a previous monolithic planar detector studied, the MIMOTERA. The direct annihilation of low energy anti-protons (~ 100 keV) takes place in the first layers and we show that the charged annihilation products (pions and nuclear fragments) can be detected by such a sensor. The present study aims at understanding the signature of an annihilation event in a 3D silicon sensor, in order to assess the accuracy that can be achieved by such a sensor in the reconstruction of the position of annihilation, when the same happens directly on the detector surface. We also present a comparison between experimental data and GEANT4 simulations and previous data obtained with a silicon imaging detector. These results are being used to determine the geometrical and process parameters to be adopted by the silicon annihilation detector to be installed in AEg̅IS.