Response of the MIMOSIS-1 CMOS Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor to particle beams with different dE/dx

The ultra -thin and highly granular CMOS Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) are typically optimized for high rate high precision tracking, which implies the use of a very thin active medium and digital readout. Both features hamper using the devices for identifying low momentum particles by means of dE/dx. Still, MAPS feature charge sharing and typically clusters of more than one fired pixel per impinging particles are formed. It was previously shown that the number of fired pixels per cluster scales with the dE/dx, which allowed identifying highly ionizing nuclear fragments [1]. Assuming a sufficiently strong response to different dE/dx, this approach could also be considered for distinguishing minimum ionizing particles (MIP) from light fragments like alpha particles in tracking detectors. In this work, we study this response with particle beams with a dE/dx of up to four times the ones of MIPs, for non -irradiated and irradiated chips, with different sensing nodes as implemented in the MIMOSIS-1 prototype used for the vertex detector of the CBM experiment.