The ALICE Trieste Group at the Physics Department of the University of Trieste, Italy, is hiring a postdoc to work on silicon detector R&D for ITS3, ALICE 3, and further applications. The research will mostly take place at the University of Trieste. Work at CERN and test beam facilities is also foreseen.

Please contact Dr. Giacomo Contin (giacomo.contin@ts.infn.it) or Prof. Paolo Camerini (paolo.camerini@ts.infn.it) for informal enquiries or further details.

"Novel silicon sensor technologies: from curved MAPS to ultra-fast timing detectors"

A quasi-massless, truly cylindrical silicon detector based on Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) technology is being currently developed. Such a detector, named ITS3, will upgrade the Inner Tracking System for the ALICE detector at LHC in 2026. It will serve as a baseline for the development of future detectors for the High-Luminosity LHC and Electron Ion Collider and for medical and space applications. In order to achieve the target performance, the design of a new large-area (30 cm x 10 cm), extremely reduced thickness (30-40 microns) and featuring very low power dissipation, is now ongoing, with the goal of building a series of curved silicon layers without additional infrastructures. The MAPS technology will be also explored for high time resolution measurements, and its performance will be compared with other technologies like SPAD, SiPM and LGAD, to be used in the same applications mentioned before. The research activities within this contract will focus mainly on the functional characterization of such sensor prototypes through performance measurements and evaluation in laboratory and beam tests, aiming at providing feedback to the sensor design process and qualify the devices. Moreover, this research will involve the development and implementations of wafer-scale chip thinning techniques, methods, and tools to bend them in a controlled way and interconnect them for their integration in the detector apparatus. Sensor response simulations may be carried out to verify the observed performance of the devices under test.