The BaBar Silicon Vertex Tracker

Abstract

The BaBar Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT) is a five layer device, made from double-sided silicon strip detectors and read out via a custom time-over-threshold circuit, the AToM chip. The SVT is an essential part of the physics program of BaBar, and is able to reconstruct B meson decay vertices with a precision sufficient to measure time-dependent CP violating asymmetries at the PEP-II asymmetric e +e − collider. This report will give an overview of the SVT, with particular focus on the performance of the SVT, which has been taking colliding beam data since May 1999.