A Pascalian lateral drift sensor

Abstract A novel concept of a layer-wise produced semiconductor sensor for precise particle tracking is proposed herein. In contrast to common semiconductor sensors, local regions with increased doping concentration deep in the bulk termed charge guides increase the lateral drift of free charges on their way to the read-out electrode. This lateral drift enables charge sharing independent of the incident position of the traversing particle. With a regular grid of charge guides the lateral charge distribution resembles a normalised Pascal׳s triangle for particles that are stopped in depths lower than the depth of the first layer of the charge guides. For minimum ionising particles a sum of binomial distributions describes the lateral charge distribution. This concept decouples the achievable sensor resolution from the pitch size as the characteristic length is replaced by the lateral distance of the charge guides.