The CMS silicon strip tracker and its electronic readout

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (Geneva, CH) will be the world's biggest accelerator machine when operation starts in 2006. One of its four detector experiments is the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), consisting of a large-scale silicon tracker and electromagnetic and hadron calorimeters, all embedded in a solenoidal magnetic field of 4T, and a muon system surrounding the magnet coil. The Silicon Strip Tracker has a sensitive area of 206m sup 2 with 10 million analog channels which are read out at the collider frequency of 40 MHz. The building blocks of the CMS Tracker are the silicon sensors, APV amplifier ASICs, supporting front-end ASICs, analog and digital optical links as well as data processors and control units in the back-end. Radiation tolerance, readout speed and the huge data volume are challenging requirements. I have modeled the charge collection in silicon detectors which is discussed as well as the concepts of readout amplifiers with respect to the LHC requirements, including the deconvolution method of fast pulse shaping, electronic noise constraints and radiation effects. Moreover, I performed extensive measurements on prototype components of the CMS Tracker and different versions of the APV chip in particular. I contributed to the construction of several detector modules, characterized them in particle beam tests and quantified radiation induced effects on the APV chip and on silicon detectors. In addition I evaluated a prototype of the analog optical link and the analog performance of the back-end digitization unit. The results are very encouraging, demonstrating the feasibility of the CMS Silicon Strip Tracker system and motivating progress towards the construction phase.