A microstrip silicon telescope for high performance particle tracking

Bent crystals are thin silicon/germanium devices that act as a bulk dipole magnet and thus are able to deflect relativistic charged particle beams with high efficiency (up to 98%). To study their behavior on extracted beamlines in terms of deflection capability and efficiency, a fast and high position resolution telescope is needed such as the INSULAB telescope.
It consists in several modules equipped with double or single side silicon detectors readout by different ASICs. The Data Acquisition system is designed to work with pulsed beams minimizing the dead time to allow the collection of a large statistics in a short time. It is based on custom VME readout/memory boards for the data storage and 12 bit ADC custom boards for the signal digitization; the present maximum DAQ rate is 6 kHz.
A detailed description of the detectors, the ASICs and the readout system together with the results obtained at the SPS H4 and PS T9 CERN beamlines in terms of spatial resolution and charge sharing are presented.