Development of silicon strip detectors for a medium energy gamma-ray telescope

The Medium Energy Gamma-ray Astronomy (MEGA) telescope is a new instrument under development by the gamma-astronomy group at MPE. In MEGA, the primary photon interaction is recorded in a stack of double-sided silicon strip detectors (the tracker). A small prototype of the tracker is currently being assembled at MPE with 11 detector layers each consisting of 3/spl times/3 silicon wafers connected to low noise VLSI amplifiers. We report on the design, status and results of these prototype detectors. For photons of 122 keV, an energy resolution of 15 keV FWHM and trigger threshold of 30 keV has been achieved.