Studies of the Super VELO

The Super VELO is the Run 5 upgrade of the VeloPix detector of the LHCb experiment. Its most challenging task is to cope with a luminosity increase of the factor 10. This study examines the potential physics performance of a detector based on the VeloPix design at high luminosity conditions. It is found that an unmodified VeloPix detector shows poor performance when exposed to 10x design luminosity, most gravely high ghost rates of 40 %. When applying basic assumptions about material changes such as cutting the silicon thickness by half and removing the RF foil, the ghost rate drops by 20 %. When using thin silicon and re-optimizing the tracking algorithm, the ghost rate can even be reduced by 60 %. Applying the additional modification of a pixel area size four times smaller, the ghost rate drops by 88 % and the IP resolution improves. Finally, in a dream scenario with thin silicon, smaller pixels and no RF foil, big gains in resolution and a ghost rate of less than 4 % can be achieved.