Speaker:  Cecilia Ferrari 

Host: Dr. Afroditi Papadopoulou

Title: LArPix: 3D Pixelated Charge Readout for DUNE

Abstract:

For about five decades, time projection chambers have enabled high-resolution tracking and calorimetry across particle physics, while their charge-readout technologies have evolved to meet increasingly diverse requirements in scale, granularity, event rate and dynamical range. This seminar will briefly trace this evolution before focusing on LArPix, an end-to-end pixelated charge-readout system developed for liquid-argon TPCs in the context of the DUNE experiment. LArPix couples individual anode pads to cryogenic, low-power ASIC channels with self-triggered amplification, digitization, and multiplexed digital readout, providing native 3D imaging. For the DUNE near-detector (ND-LAr), this architecture scales up to approximately 14 million pixels to fully instrument  the 210 m2 anode surface.

In this seminar I will discuss the LArPix operating principle, ASIC and system architecture, evolution toward scalable and fault-tolerant networks, and performance in ton-scale prototypes, highlighting its role in reconstructing complex neutrino interactions in the high-rate DUNE near-detector environment.