Radiation Damage: Experience with Silicon Detectors in High Energy Particle Beams at CERN

Silicon detectors are expected to play an important role in future miniaturized high energy physics experiments. They can be used in target telescopes to measure the interaction point and the event multiplicity. Particle localisation with a precision of the order of 10 µm seems possible with the recently developed multi-electrode silicon detector or the silicon microstrip detector2, which will enable precise track reconstruction near the vertex. To obtain the high resolution, a possible approach is the charge division between widely spaced strips. This requires a very good noise performance of detector and electronics. In the alternative approach, many closely spaced strips are read out individually, and particles are located with the precision corresponding to the pitch of the strips. Only the presence of a signal needs to be detected, relative to one or two discrimination levels, and digital data treatment can be used.