Development of thin pixel detectors on epitaxial silicon for HEP experiments

The foreseen luminosity of the new experiments in High Energy Physics will require that the innermost layer of vertex detectors will be able to sustain fluencies up to 10^16 neq/cm^2. Moreover, in many experiments there is a demand for the minimization of the material budget of the detectors. Therefore, thin pixel devices fabricated on n-type silicon are a natural choice to fulfill these requirements due to their rad-hard performances and low active volume. We present an R&D activity aimed at developing a new thin hybrid pixel device in the framework of PANDA experiments. The detector of this new device is a p-on-n pixel sensor realized starting from epitaxial silicon wafers and back thinned up to 50–100 μm after process completion. We present the main technological steps and some electrical characterization on the fabricated devices before and after back thinning and after bump bonding to the front-end electronics.