THE CMS SILICON STRIP TRACKER: SYSTEM TESTS AND TEST BEAM RESULTS

With a total area of 210 squaremeters and about 15000 single silicon modules the silicon strip tracker of the CMS experiment at the LHC will be the largest silicon strip detector ever built. While the performance of the individual mechanical and electronic components has already been tested extensively, their interplay in larger integrated substructures also has to be studied before mass production can be launched, in order to ensure the envisaged performance of the overall system. This is the main purpose of the system tests, during which hardware components as final as possible are being integrated into substructures of the tracker subsystems. System tests are currently being carried out for all subsystems of the tracker. In addition, silicon modules and electronic components have been operated and studied in a particle beam environment. In this report results from the CMS silicon tracker system tests and a test beam experiment at CERN are presented.