The ZEUS microvertex detector

A new vertex detector far the ZEUS experiment at HERA will be installed during the 1999-2000 shutdown, for the high-luminosity runs of HERA. It will allow to reconstruct secondary vertex tracks, coming from the decay of long-lived particles with a lifetime of about 10(-12) s, and improve the global momentum resolution of the tracking system. The interaction region will be surrounded with single-sided silicon strip detectors, with capacitive charge division: three double layers in the central region (600 detectors), and 4 "wheels" in the forward region (112 silicon planes). Due to the high number of readout channels, 512 readout strips per silicon plane in the barrel region and 480 in the forward part, and the large coverage of the vertex detector (almost I m long), the front-end electronics has to be placed on top of the detectors and has to be radiation tolerant since doses up to 2 kGy are expected near the interaction region. The HELIX chip has been chosen as analog chip with a low-noise, charge-sensitive amplifier/shaper. The chip integrates 128 read out channels which are sampled in an analog pipeline with the HERA bunch crossing frequency of 10.4 MHz. A review of the status of the project is presented. A test program is underway in order to gain experience in the understanding of the detectors and their performance characteristics (i.e. detection efficiency, noise, large angle track position resolution, irradiation studies). (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.