LARGE AREA CYLINDRICAL SILICON DRIFT DETECTOR

An advanced silicon drift detector, a large area cylindrical drift detector, was designed, produced, tested and installed in the NA45 experiment. The active area of the detector is practically the total area of a 3 inch diameter wafer. Signal electrons created in the silicon detector by fast charged particles drift radially outside toward an array of 360 anodes located on the periphery of the detector. The drift time measures the radial coordinate of the particle's intersection; the charge sharing between anodes measures the azimuthal coordinate. The detector provides unambiguous pairs of r,phi coordinates for events with multiplicities up to several hundred. Its use in the experiment aims at a position resolution of 20 mum (rms) in each direction giving about 2.10(6) two-dimensional elements. There is a small hole in the center of the detector to allow the passage of the noninteracting particle beam. The longest drift distance is about 3 cm. The nominal value of the drift field is 500 V/cm resulting in a maximum drift time of 4 mus.