The CMS Tracker sub-detector & its readout electronics

The CMS Tracker is sits at the heart of the CMS detector. It consists of 15000 silicon sensors, whose goal is to reconstruct the flight paths of the thousands of charged particles produced in each LHC collision.

RAL developed major components of the electronics used to read data from the Tracker. --- `APV’ chips read data from 10 million data channels 40 million times each second. The data from selected (‘triggered’) events is then passed to the `FED’ board, shown here, which identifies where charged particles crossed the silicon sensors.