If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.
Japanese Proverb
Basic research in the field of high energy physics is mainly motivated by the curiosity of mankind. It does not make direct economical profit, but one may call it a cultural achievement similar to arts. General research is often reversely argumented by technological spin-offs, e.g. the World Wide Web, which originated at CERN, but there is more than meets the eye.
In fact, there are future benefits which are unpredictable at the time of discovery. When the electron was found, nobody thought about its application in television sets. Who knows what current high energy physics will bring us in the distant future?
This thesis contributes to a basic research project in particle physics. It is embedded in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), a detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine at CERN, which will be a powerful experimental tool for high energy physicists. The work is focussed on technological aspects of the CMS Silicon Strip Tracker and the evaluation of prototype readout components.
But experimental results are meaningless if not put into the right context. Thus, approximately half of this thesis is dedicated to an introduction to LHC, the principle of silicon particle detectors, the CMS experiment and especially its Silicon Strip Tracker. Despite of the above citation, I hope that the basic concepts of high energy physics experiments and the CMS Silicon Strip Tracker in particular will be conveyed.
In 1998, I began to work on the silicon detector as a member of the CMS collaboration. Since I am an Electrical Engineer, my personal emphasis has been laid upon the electronic readout, which is quite a challenging task in the LHC environment.
All of the tests described within this thesis were performed by the CMS Tracker and Electronics II groups at HEPHY [1]. In most cases, I was the main contributor to hardware and software preparation, conducted the experiments and analyzed the data.
Markus Friedl
May 2001