The LHCb Silicon Tracker

The LHCb experiment is designed to perform high-precision measurements of CP violation and search for new physics using the enormous flux of beauty and charm hadrons produced at the LHC. The LHCb detector is a single-arm spectrometer with excellent tracking and particle identification capabilities. The Silicon Tracker is part of the tracking system and measures very precisely the particle trajectories coming from the interaction point in the region of high occupancies around the beam axis. The LHCb Silicon Tracker covers a total sensitive area of about 12 m2 using silicon micro-strip detectors with long readout strips. It consists of one four-layer tracking station before the LHCb dipole magnet and three stations after. The detector has performed extremely well since the start of the LHC operation despite the fact that the experiment is collecting data at instantaneous luminosities well above the design value. This paper reports on the operation and performance of the Silicon Tracker during the Physics data taking at the LHC during the last two years.