Intermediate Silicon Tracker in sPHENIX at RHIC

¹ Department of Physics, and Center for High Energy and High Field Physics, National Central University, Taoyuan, Taiwan
² Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, RIKEN, Wako, Japan

^* e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Published online: 5 November 2025

Abstract

The sPHENIX collaboration has been taking data since 2023 at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in BNL to study the Quark-Gluon Plasma and cold Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). The tracking system of sPHENIX consists of a time projection chamber, a MAPS-based vertex detector, and an intermediate silicon tracker (INTT). Together with the sPHENIX full barrel calorimeter system, the measurement of the heavy-flavor jets and the upsilonstate identification is enabled. INTT, located in the intermediate region of the tracking system and consisting of two layers of silicon strip sensors that surround the beam direction azimuthally, detects hit points to enhance tracking precision. Thanks to the good timing resolution of INTT, it also provides timing information to the corresponding hits of other tracking detectors. This capability eliminates pile-up events due to misidentifying bunch crossings. This proceeding discusses the achievements of INTT using Au+Au collision data taken in 2023, and the status of INTT commissioning with proton+proton collisions in 2024.