Design and performance of the LHCb silicon tracker

The LHCb detector is currently being installed at the large hadron collider at CERN and is foreseen to start operating in 2007. It is designed to perform high-precision measurements of CP violation and rare decays of B hadrons. The silicon tracker is part of the LHCb tracking system. It consists of the trigger tracker in front of the experimentʹs dipole magnet and the inner tracker downstream of the magnet. Both detectors employ silicon micro-strip technology to cope with the charged particle fluxes of up to 5 × 10 5 cm - 2 s - 1 that are expected in the innermost regions of the detectors. In this note, the design and production status of the trigger tracker and the inner tracker are presented together with an overview of the LHCb tracking strategy.