Experience with the ALEPH silicon vertex detector

Abstract The ALEPH experiment [1] at LEP is equipped with a vertex detector [2] using two layers of double-sided silicon strip detectors. These detectors allow a real two-dimensional measurement of charged particle tracks. The present (1991) detector has the inner layer at a radius of 6.5 cm and the outer layer at 11.5 cm. The theta angle coverage is ±33° for the inner layer and ±50° for the outer layer. The inner layer is made out of 9 faces with four silicon detectors each, the outer layer has 15 such faces. We use silicon detectors of 5 × 5 cm 2 and 300 μm thickness. The readout pitch is 100 μm at both sides and using capacitive charge division a resolution in the order of 10 μm can be a…