Silicon subsystem mechanical engineering work for the solenoidal detector collaboration

The silicon tracking system (STS) for the Solenoidal Detector Collaboration (SDC) represented an order of magnitude increase in size over any silicon system that had been previously built or even planned. In order to meet its performance requirements, it could not simply be a linear scalingof earlier systems, but instead required completely new concepts. The small size of the early systems made it possible to simply move the support hardware and services largely outside the active volume of the system. For a system five meters long, that simply is not an option. The design of the STS for the SDC experiment was the result of numerous compromises between the capabilities required to do the physics and the limitations imposed by cost, material properties, and silicon strip detector characteristics. From the point of view of the physics, the silicon system should start as close to the interaction pointas possible. In addition, the detectors should measure the position of particles passing through them with no errors, and should not deflect or interact with the particles in any way. However, cost, radiation damage, and other factors limiting detector performance dictated, other, more realistic values. Radiation damagelimited the inner radius ofmore » the silicon detectors to about 9 cm, whereas cost limited the outer radius of the detectors to about 50 cm. Cost also limits the half length of the system to about 250 cm. To control the effects of radiation damageon the detectors required operating the system at a temperature of 0{degrees}C or below, and maintaining that temperature throughout life of the system. To summarize, the physics and properties of the silicon strip detectors requires that the detectors be operated at or below 0{degrees}C, be positioned very accurately during assembly and remain positionally stable throughout their operation, and that all materials used be radiation hard and have a large thickness for one radiation length.« less