Ultra-low material pixel layers for the Mu3e experiment

The upcoming Mu3e experiment will search for the charged lepton flavour violating decay of a muon at rest into three electrons. The maximal energy of the electrons is 53 MeV, hence a low material budget is a key performance requirement for the tracking detector. In this paper we summarize our approach to meet the requirement of about 1 ‰ of a radiation length per pixel detector layer. This includes the choice of thinned active monolithic pixel sensors in HV-CMOS technology, ultra-thin flexible printed circuits, and helium gas cooling.