Development of the PHENIX silicon pixel detector

Abstract

The PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is being upgraded with a novel four-layer silicon vertex tracker. The detector will enhance the physics capabilities of PHENIX in the future phase of the heavy-ion and the polarized proton-proton programs at RHIC. The silicon vertex tracker will allow the direct measurement of heavy quark production by identifying displaced decay vertices, and will reconstruct jets with nearly full azimuthal coverage over ¦η¦ < 1.2. We are developing a novel Silicon Pixel Detector for the inner two barrel layers of the silicon vertex tracker. In this paper, the status of the development is reported.