A Proposal to Upgrade the Silicon Strip Detector

The STAR Silicon Strip Detector (SSD) was built by a collaboration of Nantes, Strasbourg and Warsaw collaborators. It is a beautiful detector; it can provide 500 mu m scale pointing resolution at the vertex when working in combination with the TPC. It was first used in Run 4, when half the SSD was installed in an engineering run. The full detector was installed for Run 5 (the Cu-Cu run) and the operation and performance of the detector was very successful. However, in preparation for Run 6, two noisy ladders (out of 20) were replaced and this required that the SSD be removed from the STAR detector. The re-installation of the SSD was not fully successful and so for the next two Runs, 6 and 7, the SSD suffered a cooling system failure that allowed a large fraction of the ladders to overheat and become noisy, or fail. (The cause of the SSD cooling failure was rather trivial but the SSD could not be removed between Runs 6 and 7 due to the inability of the STAR detector to roll along its tracks at that time.)