Towards the integration of the MicroVertex Detector in the PANDA experiment.

Abstract

The PANDA experiment will make use of cooled antiproton beams of unprecedented quality that will be available at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt. It includes the Micro Vertex Detector (MVD) as innermost detector of the traking system, specially able to detect secondary vertices of short-live particles. Due to the forward boost the MVD layout is asymmetric with four barrels surrounding the interaction point and six disks in the forward direction. The innermost layers are composed of hybrid epitaxial silicon pixels and the outermost ones of double-sided silicon strips, with 10.3 x 106 pixels and 162 x 103 strip channels. PANDA features a triggerless architecture, therefore the MVD has to run with a continous data transmission at a high interaction rate (107 interaction/s) where hits have precise timestamps (the experiment clock is 160 MHz). In addition the energy loss of particles in the sensor should be measured. To cope with these requirements custom readout chips are under development for both pixel ans strip devices. The powering and cooling are challenging since the MVD volume is limited by the surrounding detectors and the routing is only foreseen in the backward direction. Support structures are made of carbon fibers and high thermally conductive carbon foam with embedded cooling pipes beneath the readout chips is integrated. The design of the MVD is an advanced stage and its technological aspects will be reported.