The PHOBOS silicon sensors

PHOBOS is one of the four experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. PHOBOS almost exclusively utilizes silicon sensors to measure charged particle multiplicity distributions and to track particles in a 2-arm spectrometer. The detector consists of about 450 silicon pad sensors. Nine different pad geometries are used to match the different physics needs of the experiment. A relatively high granularity, of up to 1536 channels per sensor, is used in the spectrometer. The multiplicity detector uses 128 and 64 channel sensors and the charge deposition per pad is measured to determine the multiplicity of single events. All sensors are of the double-metal silicon pad type with pad sizes from 1 cm² up to 4 cm². They are produced in Taiwan by the ERSO foundry under supervision of Miracle Co. and National Central University. An extensive testing procedure makes it possible to select sensors suited for use in PHOBOS. Detector modules consisting of up to five sensors are read out with integrated chips of either 64 or 128 channels. The testing of the sensors and the performance of assembled detector modules is discussed.