The GLAST Large Area Telescope

The Large Area Telescope (LAT) is the main instrument of the GLAST satellite, designed for the study of the gamma-ray sky between 20 MeV and 1 TeV, scheduled for launch by NASA in 2006. The LAT will revolutionize the field addressing many of the unresolved questions in high-energy astrophysics with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity. Key to efficient and precise photon detection and measurement is the γ→e+e− vertex reconstruction from the LAT tracker. Technologies that make the LAT such an expectional detector, mainly due to the use of particle physics instrumentation, are discussed in this paper.