Nuclear Physics Seminar

In December 2010 the PHENIX Collaboration opened a new era for measuring heavy flavor at RHIC with the installation of the Silicon Vertex Tracker (VTX). Our prime motivation with VTX is to enable reconstruction of particules carring heavy flavor (charm or beauty quarks) production in A+A, p(d)+A, and (polarized) p+p collisions through precision tracking including displaced vertices. These are key
physics measurements with which to study the properties of the strongly-coupled QGP formed at RHIC.
The VTX construction phase is now complete, and the detector was commissioned using p+p collisions at 500 GeV and subsequently took physics data with Au+Au collisions at RHIC energies during Run-11. The VTX detector consists of a four-layer barrel detector, with each surrounding the interaction region, |eta| < 1.2 and nearly 2pi in azimuth. The inner two barrels are comprised of silicon pixel sensors. We use pixel read-out chip that was developed at CERN for silicon pixel detector of ALICE experiment at LHC. The outer two barrels are silicon stripixel detectors, single-sided sensors with
2-dimensional readout and a new "spiral" design developed at BNL instrumentation division.
In this talk, I will present the physics capabilities of the Silicon Vertex Tracker in PHENIX, its technology choices, construction stages, readout, and discuss the performance. I will also present the results of the reconstruction using VTX with Run-11 data.