Radiation damage studies for the BaBar Silicon Vertex Tracker

The Silicon Vertex Tracker of the BaBar experiment is a five-layer, double-sided AC-coupled silicon microstrip detector operating on the PEP-II storage ring at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. After more than four years of running, the silicon sensors and the front-end electronics in the inner layer have absorbed radiation doses up to 2 Mrad. In this paper we present results from radiation hardness tests and discuss the implications of the absorbed radiation dose on the Silicon Vertex Tracker lifetime.