Performance of the ALEPH upgraded silicon vertex detector

The ALEPH Vertex Detector (VDET) has been upgraded for the second phase of LEP running. The new version still uses double sided silicon strip detectors, fabricated with the same technology as the previous one, but the upgraded one is twice as long and has about half passive material in the tracking volume. Furthermore the readout electronics is now radiation hard (MX7-RH chips). An almost complete version of the upgraded VDET was installed in ALEPH during a three week LEP technical stop and took data in November 1995 during the LEP run at 130 GeV. The new detector worked well showing high signal over noise ratio and good efficiency. The point resolution measured during this run, using high momentum muons, 13 mu m in the r - phi view and 21 mu m in the r - z view, is dominated by the alignment precision, due to the low statistics available for this short LEP run. This result is however acceptable, since for lower momentum charged particle, the multiple scattering gives a significant contribution to the final impact parameter resolution. A better resolution has been achieved in the next run, when an initial period at the Z peak has been foreseen to calibrate and align the whole detector.