Performance of the Belle II Silicon Vertex Detector

The Belle II experiment at the SuperKEKB collider of KEK (Japan) will accumulate 50 ab$^{-1}$ of $e^+e^-$ collision data at an unprecedented instantaneous luminosity of $8\times 10^{35}$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$, about 40 times larger than its predecessor. The Belle II vertex detector (VXD) provides inner tracking, impact parameter measurement and decay vertex reconstruction for the Belle II detector and consists of two layers of DEPFET-based pixels (PXD) and four layers of double sided silicon strip detectors (SVD), the latter being the focus of this paper. We review the design of the SVD and its assembly and commissioning, and report preliminary results obtained with SVD during the first physics run of Belle II from March to June 2019.