Special lecture by Prof. Dr. N. Wermes

This series of three lectures discusses the physics of signal generation, detection and processing in particle detectors. It shortly recapitulates the different mechanisms how particles create detectable signals in detectors. Then I will discuss, how detector electrodes sense these generated signals (usually charges). The lecture continues with a detailed discussion about a typical readout chain including amplifiers, filters, discriminators, analog-to-digital conversion and data transmission and will end with the treatment of noise in an amplifier/filter system (charge sensitive amplifiers (CSA)+shaper) and some explicit calculations of noise in three typical detector systems (of the ATLAS experiment).