Commissioning, operation and performance of the CMS Silicon Strip Tracker detector

The CMS silicon strip tracker is the largest device of this type ever built for detection of charge particles produced in beam-beam collisions. There are 24244 single-sided micro-strip sensors covering an active area of over 200 square meters, and nearly 10 millions channels to be read out. The detector was installed inside CMS in December 2007, and it was commissioned during the summer 2008. Since then it integrated several global CMS cosmic muons data taking and performances were measured. The commissioning strategy, operational experience learned during the data taking period, and detector performance results will be presented.