Design, construction and prototyping of the silicon strip tracker for the Micro Vertex Detector of the PANDA Experiment

The future PANDA-Experiment at the FAIR accelerator facility in Darmstadt/Germany utilizes an antiproton beam with momenta of 1.5 - 15 GeV/c incident on a hydrogen or heavy element fixed target. It addresses open questions concerning the strong interaction with one focus on high precision charmonium spectroscopy. The spatial and timing resolution in detecting fast-decaying particles e.g. in open-charm channels is crucial and requires the application of thin solid state detectors coupled with a fast untriggered readout electronics. The contribution will focus on the silicon microstrip tracker of the innermost subdetector, the Micro Vertex Detector (MVD), which is composed of double-sided silicon strip detectors (DSSDs). These are connected to ultrathin flex modules carrying novel fast self-triggering front-end ASICs named PASTA. The construction of the DSSD modules, the carrier PCB and the architecture of the PASTA chip will be discussed as well as methods to qualify the sensors. An overview of the prototypes developed and tested up to now is given together with the future steps to be taken in order to arrive at the mass production of the full-scale modules.