A Silicon Vertex Tracker upgrade for the PHENIX experiment at RHIC

Preparations have started on the design and construction of a Silicon Vertex Tracker for the PHENIX experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratoryʹs Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The Vertex Tracker is one of several new detector systems that will substantially enhance the future physics capabilities of the experiment. In this future phase, taking place in the second half of this decade, the RHIC program will turn from establishing the existence of the dense nuclear medium that is created in heavy ion collisions, to detailed investigations of its properties. The experiment also aims to explore the nucleon spin-structure in collisions of polarized proton beams, and to study nucleon parton structure and gluon saturation in proton–nucleus collisions. Throughout this program, the new silicon detector will enable through precision vertex tracking the direct measurement of heavy-quark production. The silicon detector consists of pixel, “strip-pixel” and “mini-strip” detectors in a multi-layer barrel and end-caps arrangement closely surrounding the interaction region. rticle outlines aspects of the physics motivation for the PHENIX Silicon Vertex Tracker upgrade and the detector concept chosen to access the important new physics observables available at RHIC. The barrel detector and its expected performance are described in some detail, followed by an overview of the development effort and the status of the initial production of the silicon components.