Calibration and Monitoring of the CMS Silicon Strip Tracker detector

The CMS Silicon Strip Tracker (SST) is the largest detector of this kind ever built for a high energy physics experiment. It consists of more than ten millions of analog read-out channels, split between 15,148 detector modules. To ensure that the SST performance fully meets the physics requirements of the CMS experiment, the detector is precisely calibrated and constantly monitored to identify, at a very early stage, any possible problem both in the data acquisition and in the reconstruction chain. Due to its high granularity, the operation of the CMS SST is a challenging task. In this paper we describe the reconstruction strategies, the calibration procedures and the data quality monitoring system that the CMS Collaboration has devised to accurately operate the SST detector.