Laboratory Characterization of Innovative 3D Trench-design Silicon Pixel Sensors Using a Sub-Picosecond Precision Laser-Based Testing Equipment

In the next generation of experiments at the future high luminosity particle colliders, the identification of the interaction and decay vertices will be an extremely difficult task because of the very large number of particles that will be produced at each bunch crossing. LHC experiments have shown that new vertex detectors with single-hit time resolutions of the order of 10 ps will allow to recover the current tracking and vertexing capabilities. The TimeSPOT project is developing 3D trench-based silicon pixel detectors with a time resolution below 30 ps. Initial beam test with a first sensors batch has showed that these detectors fulfill and even exceed these expectations. To carefully study their performances and optimize their design, it is important to precisely measure sensors time response over their active area. This paper summarize the preliminary measurements of this sensors developed within the TimeSPOT project performed in our laboratory, using a custom laser-based setup to deposit a known energy in specific regions of the pixel sensitive volume, allowing us to estimate the performances of these sensors under charge-particle illumination.