Heavy flavour physics at colliders with silicon strip vertex detectors

The physics of heavy flavours has played a dominant role in high energy physics research ever since the discovery of charm in 1974, followed by the τ lepton in 1975 and bottom in 1977. With the startup of the large experiments at the e+e- colliders LEP and the SLC a new type of detector system has now come into operation which has a major impact on the studies of heavy flavours; the silicon strip vertex detector. The basic design principles of these novel detector systems are outlined and three representative experimental realizations are discussed. The impact of these detectors on the studies of the properties of heavy flavours is just emerging and focuses on the measurement of lifetimes and the tagging of the presence of heavy flavour hadrons in hadronic events. The tools that are being developed for these studies are described as well as details of representative analyses. The potential of these devices and the associated technological developments that were necessary for their application in the colliding beam environment is reflected in a plethora of new proposals to build sophisticated silicon detector systems for a large variety of future high energy physics applications. Two examples will be briefly sketched, a vertex detector for an asymmetric e+e- bottom factory and a large scale tracking system for a multipurpose detector at one of the new large hadron colliders. (orig.)