STAR heavy flavor tracker

Abstract

Hadrons containing heavy quarks are a clean probe of the early dynamic evolution of the dense and hot medium created in high-energy nuclear collisions. To explore heavy quark production at RHIC, the Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT) for the STAR experiment was built and installed in time for RHIC Run 14. The HFT consists of four layers of silicon detectors. The two outermost layers are silicon strip detectors and the two innermost layers are made from state-of-the-art ultra-thin CMOS Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS). This is the first application of a CMOS MAPS detector in a collider experiment. The use of thin pixel sensors plus the use of carbon fiber supporting material limits the material budget to be only 0.4% radiation length per pixel detector layer, enabling the reconstruction of low p T heavy flavor hadrons. The status and performance of the HFT in the RHIC 200 GeV Au + Au run in 2014 are reported. Very good detector efficiency, hit residuals and track resolution (DCAs) were observed in the cosmic ray data and in the Au + Au data.