Overview of the CMS pixel detector

The Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment (CMS) will start taking data at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2009. It will investigate the proton-proton collisions at 14 TeV. A robust tracking combined with a precise vertex reconstruction is crucial to address the physics challenge of proton collisions at this energy. To this extent an all-silicon tracking system with very fine granularity has been built and now is in the final commissioning phase. It represents the largest silicon tracking detector ever built. The system is composed by an outer part, made of micro-strip detectors, and an inner one, made of pixel detectors. The pixel detector consists of three pixel barrel layers and two forward disks at each side of the interaction region. Each pixel sensor, both for the barrel and forward detectors, has 100×150 μm² cells for a total of 66 million pixels covering a total area of about 1 m². The pixel detector will play a crucial role in the pattern recognition and the track reconstruction both in the offline analysis and online high-level trigger.