Extraction of CMS Silicon Strip Tracker

Last week, the current Silicon Strip Tracker has been extracted from the CMS detector. This bittersweet moment makes way for the new CMS Tracker system currently being built for the HiLumi LHC.

The CMS Tracker, the biggest silicon strip tracker in high-energy physics ever built, was installed in 2007. Measuring 5.3 m in length and 2.6 m in diameter, it contains 15 200 highly sensitive detector modules, with a total of about 10 million detector strips, and 72 000 microelectronic chips. Since the start of LHC, it has seen trillions of collisions and has been essential to the enormous body of CMS research.

The innermost part of the CMS tracking system, the Pixel detector, was carefully removed in September. Extracting these detectors and their services from the heart of CMS has been a complex and delicate process, with Tracker and tooling weight exceeding 6 tonnes, but several years of preparation, planning, detailed work on tooling, and the efforts of the teams have paid off.

In 2027, the Silicon Strip Tracker will be taken apart. Some modules will be reused in the SND experiment in the LHC tunnel, and others safely disposed of or distributed amongst CMS institutes.