The silicon vertex detector of the Belle II experiment

After 10 years of successful operation, the Belle experiment at KEK (Tsukuba, Japan) will be completed in 2010. Thereafter, a major upgrade of the KEK-B machine is foreseen until 2014, aiming at a final luminosity of 8×1035 cm−2 s−1, which is about 40 times higher than the present peak value. Consequently, also the Belle experiment needs to be changed and the Silicon Vertex Detector (SVD) in particular will be completely replaced as it already operates close to its limits in the present system. ture SVD (a.k.a. SuperSVD) will consist of four layers of double-sided silicon strip detectors like the present one, but at larger radii, because it will be complemented by a two-layer pixel detector as the innermost sensing device. The SuperSVD will be entirely composed of silicon sensors made from 6 in. wafers read out by APV25 front-end chips that were originally developed for the CMS experiment at the LHC. l years of R&D effort led to innovations such as the Origami chip-on-sensor concept and readout electronics with hit time finding which were successfully demonstrated on prototypes. These features will be included in the final system which is presently being designed. This paper will give an overview of the SuperSVD and present results from prototype tests ranging from detector modules to back-end electronics.