Commissioning and performance of the LHCb Silicon Tracker

The LHCb Silicon Tracker is a silicon micro-strip detector with a sensitive area of 12 m2 and a total of 272k readout channels. The Silicon Tracker consists of two parts that use different detector modules. The detector installation was completed by early summer 2008 and the commissioning without beam has reached its final stage, successfully overcoming most of the encountered problems. Currently, the detector has more than 99% of the channels fully functioning. Commissioning with particles has started using beam-induced events from the LHC injection tests in 2008 and 2009. These events allowed initial studies of the detector performance. Especially, the detector modules could be aligned with an accuracy of about 20μm. Furthermore, with the first beam collisions that took place end of 2009 we could further study the performance and improve the alignment of the detector

The LHCb Silicon Tracker: lessons learned (so far)

The LHCb Silicon Tracker is part of the main tracking system of the LHCb detector. It covers the full acceptance angle in front of the dipole magnet in the Tracker Turicensis (TT) station and the innermost part in the three Inner Tracker (IT) stations downstream of the magnet. We report on final elements of the production, the installation and commissioning process in the experiment. Focusing on electronic and hardware issues we describe the lessons learned and the pitfalls encountered. First experience of detector operation is presented