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The Mu3e experiment aims to find or exclude the lepton flavour violating decay $\mu^+\to e^+e^-e^+$ with a sensitivity of one in 10$^{16}$ muon decays. The first phase of the experiment is currently under construction at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI, Switzerland), where beams with up to 10$^8$ muons per second are available. The detector will consist of an ultra-thin pixel tracker made from High-Voltage Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (HV-MAPS), complemented by scintillating tiles and fibres for precise timing measurements. The experiment produces about 100 Gbit/s of zero-suppressed data which are transported to a filter farm using a network of FPGAs and fast optical links. On the filter farm, tracks and three-particle vertices are reconstructed using highly parallel algorithms running on graphics processing units, leading to a reduction of the data to 100 Mbyte/s for mass storage and offline analysis. The paper introduces the system design and hardware implementation of the Mu3e data acquisition and filter farm., Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures Submitted to IEEE TNS

The MuPix7 is a prototype high voltage monolithic active pixel sensor with 103 times 80 um2 pixels thinned to 64 um and incorporating the complete read-out circuitry including a 1.25 Gbit/s differential data link. Using data taken at the DESY electron test beam, we demonstrate an efficiency of 99.3% and a time resolution of 14 ns. The efficiency and time resolution are studied with sub-pixel resolution and reproduced in simulations., Comment: 7 pages, 13 figures, submitted to Nucl.Instr.Meth.A

High-Voltage Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (HV-MAPS) based on a 180 nm HV-CMOS process have been proposed to realize thin, fast and highly integrated pixel sensors. The MuPix7 prototype, fabricated in the commercial AMS H18 process, features a fully integrated on-chip readout, i.e. hit-digitization, zero suppression and data serialization. MuPix7 is the first fully monolithic HV-CMOS pixel sensor that has been tested for the use in high irradiation environments like HL-LHC. We present results from laboratory and test beam measurements of MuPix7 prototypes irradiated with neutrons (up to 5.0 × 1015 neq/cm2) and 24 GeV protons (up to 7.8 × 1015 protons/cm2) and compare the performance with non-irradiated sensors. At sensor temperatures of about 8 °C efficiencies of ≥ 90% at noise rates below 40 Hz per pixel are measured for fluences of up to 1.5 × 1015 neq/cm2. A time resolution better than 22 ns, expressed as Gaussian σ , is measured for all tested settings and sensors, even at the highest irradiation fluences. The data transmission at 1.25 Gbit/s and the on-chip PLL remain fully functional.

The MuPix Telescope is a particle tracking telescope, optimized for tracking low momentum particles and high rates. It is based on the novel High-Voltage Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (HV-MAPS), designed for the Mu3e tracking detector. The telescope represents a first application of the HV-MAPS technology and also serves as test bed of the Mu3e readout chain. The telescope consists of up to eight layers of the newest prototypes, the MuPix7 sensors, which send data self-triggered via fast serial links to FPGAs, where the data is time-ordered and sent to the PC. A particle hit rate of 1 MHz per layer could be processed. Online tracking is performed with a subset of the incoming data. The general concept of the telescope, chip architecture, readout concept and online reconstruction are described. The performance of the sensor and of the telescope during test beam measurements are presented., Proceedings TWEPP 2016, 8 pages, 7 figures

The globally increased demand for helium-3 along with the limited availability of this gas calls for the development of alternative technologies for the large ESS instrumentation pool. We report on the CASCADE Project - a novel detection system, which has been developed for the purposes of neutron spin echo spectroscopy. It features 2D spatially resolved detection of thermal neutrons at high rates. The CASCADE detector is composed of a stack of solid boron-10 coated Gas Electron Multiplier foils, which serve both as a neutron converter and as an amplifier for the primary ionization deposited in the standard Argon-CO2 counting gas environment. This multi-layer setup efficiently increases the detection efficiency and serves as a helium-3 alternative. It has furthermore been possible to extract the signal of the charge traversing the stack to identify the very thin conversion layer of about 1 micrometer. This allows the precise determination of the time-of-flight, necessary for the application in MIEZE spin echo techniques., 8 pages, 11 figures. Submitted for publication in Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Proceedings of the European Conference on Neutron Scattering (ECNS2015)

The MuPix7 chip is a monolithic HV-CMOS pixel chip, thinned down to 50 \mu m. It provides continuous self-triggered, non-shuttered readout at rates up to 30 Mhits/chip of 3x3 mm^2 active area and a pixel size of 103x80 \mu m^2. The hit efficiency depends on the chosen working point. Settings with a power consumption of 300 mW/cm^2 allow for a hit efficiency >99.5%. A time resolution of 14.2 ns (Gaussian sigma) is achieved. Latest results from 2016 test beam campaigns are shown., Comment: Proceedingsfor the PIXEL2016 conference, submitted to JINST A dangling reference has been removed from this version, no other changes

Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research / A 845, 194 - 198 (2016). doi:10.1016/j.nima.2016.06.095, Mu3e is a novel experiment searching for charged lepton flavor violation in the rare decay $μ^{+}→e^{+}e^{−}e^{+}$. Decay vertex position, decay time and particle momenta have to be precisely measured in order to reject both accidental and physics background. A silicon pixel tracker based on 50 μm thin high voltage monolithic active pixel sensors (HV-MAPS) in a 1 T solenoidal magnetic field provides precise vertex and momentum information. The MuPix chip combines pixel sensor cells with integrated analog electronics and a periphery with a complete digital readout. The MuPix7 is the first HV-MAPS prototype implementing all functionalities of the final sensor including a readout state machine and high speed serialization with 1.25 Gbit/s data output, allowing for a streaming readout in parallel to the data taking. The observed efficiency of the MuPix7 chip including the full readout system is ⩾99%⩾99% in a high rate test beam., Published by Elsevier, Amsterdam

The Mu3e experiment searches for the lepton flavour violating decay mu+ -> e+e-e+, aiming for a branching fraction sensitivity of 10^-16. This requires an excellent momentum resolution for low energy electrons, high rate capability and a large acceptance. In order to minimize multiple scattering, the amount of material has to be as small as possible. These challenges can be met with a tracker built from high-voltage monolithic active pixel sensors (HV-MAPS), which can be thinned to 50 um and which incorporate the complete read-out electronics on the sensor chip. To further minimise material, the sensors are supported by a mechanical structure built from 25 um thick Kapton foil and cooled with gaseous helium., 4 pages, 10 figures