The Silicon Tracking System of the CBM Experiment at FAIR

Abstract

The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at FAIR (Darmstadt, Germany) is designed to study the dense nuclear matter in a fixed target configuration with heavy ion beams up to kinetic energies of 11 AGeV for Au+Au collision. The charged particle tracking with below 2% momentum resolution will be performed by the Silicon Tracking System (STS) located in the aperture of a dipole magnet. The detector will be able to reconstruct secondary decay vertices of rare probes, e.g., multistrange hyperons, with 50 мm spatial resolution in the heavy-ion collision environment with up to 1000 charged particle per inelastic interaction at the 10 MHz collision rate. This task requires a highly granular fast detector with radiation tolerance enough to withstand a particle fluence of up to 1014 neq/cm2 1-MeV equivalent accumulated over several years of operation. The system comprises 8 tracking stations based on double-sided silicon microstrip sensors with 58 мm pitch and strips oriented at 7.5∘ stereo angle. The analog signals are read out via stacked microcables (up to 50 cm long) by the front-end electronics based on the STS-XYTER ASIC with self-triggering architecture. Detector modules with this structure will have a material budget between 0.3% and 1.5% radiation length increasing towards the periphery. First detector modules and ladders built from pre-final components have been operated in the demonstrator experiment mCBM at GSI-SIS18 (FAIR Phase-0) providing a test stand for the performance evaluation and system integration. The results of mSTS detector commissioning and the performance in the beam will be presented.