Performance of hybrid photon detector prototypes with 80% active area for the RICH counters of LHCb

We report on the ongoing work towards a hybrid photon detector with integrated Si pixel readout for the ring imaging Cherenkov detectors of the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The photon detector is based on an electrostatically focussed image intensifier tube geometry where the image is de-magnified by a factor of ~5. The anode consists of a silicon pixel array, bump-bonded to a binary readout chip with matching pixel electronics. The performance of full-scale prototypes equipped with 61-pixel anodes and external analogue readout is presented. The average signal-to-noise ratio is ~11 with a peaking time of 1.2 mu s. The tube active-to-total surface ratio is 81.7%, which meets the LHCb requirements. The spatial precision is measured to be better than 90 mu m. A cluster of three such tubes has been installed in the LHCb RICH 1 prototype where Cherenkov gas rings have been successfully detected. Progress towards the encapsulation of new pixel electronics into a tube is also reported. In particular, the status of the development of a binary readout chip with a peaking time of 25 ns and a low and uniform detection threshold is summarized. (11 refs)