Investigation of the thickness non-uniformity of the very thin silicon-strip detectors

The properties of some very thin ( ∼ 20 μ m) large-area Single-sided Silicon-Strip Detectors (SSSDs) were investigated by using the 12C-particles elastically scattered from a Au target. In the detection system, each thin SSSD was installed in front of a thick (300 μ m or 500 μ m) Double-sided Silicon-Strip Detector (DSSD) to form a Δ E − E particle-telescope. The energy calibration of these detectors was realized by varying the beam energy and also by the irradiation from a three-component α -particle source. The thickness distribution each SSSD is precisely determined from the energy loss in the thin layer, which was independently measured by the corresponding DSSD. It is found that, for the SSSD with the nominal thicknesses of ∼ 20 μ m, the real thickness may vary by several μ m over the active area. The reason for this large non-uniformity still needs to be investigated. For the present application, this non-uniformity could be corrected according to the known pixel-thickness. This correction allows to restore a good particle identification (PID) performance for the entire large-area detector, the importance of which is demonstrated by an example of measuring the cluster-decays of the highly-excited resonant states in 16O.