Using an electron beam energy scan to characterise a silicon strip telescope

In 2006, a silicon telescope made of eight planes of strip detectors was exposed to an electron beam with available energies between 154 and 644 MeV. The study of the reconstructed tracks allowed the measurement of the effective single plane resolution which includes both intrinsic resolution and multiple scattering effects. A new method to extract the effective spatial resolution, based on the study of the track probability distribution, has been developed. The extrapolation to infinite energy has allowed to compute the intrinsic spatial resolution of the single detector plane. The method has been confirmed by preliminary results obtained with high energy muons at the CERN SPS.