The development and performance of silicon strip modules for the ATLAS forward semi-conductor tracker

The ATLAS experiment at CERN forms a big challenge in detector development, due to its size and expected data rate provided by the Large Hadron Collider, which is expected to be operational in 2007. The Semi-Conductor Tracker will use silicon strip sensors and is one of the three inner tracking detectors foreseen for the ATLAS experiment, which will be enclosed in a 2 T solenoid magnetic field. Its main goal is to provide four precision measurements of each charged particle's track. This paper focuses on the silicon strip detector modules used in the forward direction of the experiment, which are about to go into production. The two endcap detector systems that will be constructed will consist of approximately 13 m2 sensor surface with over 3 million channels in about 2000 detector modules. This paper describes the design of the detector modules and shows the results on their performance.