LHCb: The Performance and Radiation Hardness of the Outer Tracker Detector for LHCb

The LHC bexperiment is designed to study B-decays at the LHC. It is crucial to accurately and efficiently detect the charged decay particles in the high-density particle environment of the LHC. For this, the Outer Tracker (OT) has been constructed, consisting of 53,760 straw tubes, covering in total an area of 360 m2 of double layers. At the time of the conference, the detector will have operated under nominal LHC conditions for a period of about 2 years, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of approximately 2.5 fb$^{-1}$ . The performance of the detector will be discussed in terms of high voltage stability, noise rate, single hit efficiency and resolution. Finally, first results on the radiation tolerance of this sensitive gas detector will be shown, after having received a total dose corresponding to about 100 mC/cm in the hottest region.