Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY

The Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT) is a vertex detector which is part of the STAR (Solenoid Tracker at RHIC) detector located at the RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) accelerator. The HFT detector is designed to detect particles containing heavy quarks by measuring their extremely short decay vertexes. It consists of 4 silicon detection layers; the inner two layers are PXL, followed by IST and SSD as the outer layer. PXL uses novel pixilated sensors with high resolution and low mass that achieve breakthrough performance results. IST and SSD are used to point the tracks between PXL and the STAR TPC (Time Projection Chamber). Scientists and engineers at Berkeley Lab have played a major role in the design of both PXL and SSD.

More Info:

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2014/02/18/heavy-flavor-tracker-for-star/
http://science.energy.gov/np/highlights/2015/np-2015-03-a/

Pictured: Berkeley Lab Engineers, Thorsten Stezelberger and Luis Ardila-Perez

Photo Credit: Jim Thomas, SSD subsystem manager