The design and technology of the silicon strip detector modules for the Semiconductor Tracker (SCT) of the ATLAS experiment have been finalised in the last several years. Integral to this process has been the measurement and verification of the tracking performance of the different module types in test beams at the CERN SPS and the KEK PS. Tests have been performed to explore the module performance under various operating conditions including detector bias voltage, magnetic field, incidence angle, and state of irradiation up to 3×1014 protons per square centimetre. A particular emphasis has been the understanding of the operational consequences of the binary readout scheme.

Data from the SVD-2 experiment that were obtained at the IHEP accelerator in 70-GeV/c proton-nucleus interactions are analyzed with the aim of searches for an exotic Θ+ baryon that decays through the pK S 0 channel. The reaction pN → pK S 0 + X characterized by a bounded multiplicity of charged secondaries is used for this analysis. A resonance of mass M = 1526 ± 3(stat.) ± 3(syst.) MeV/c2 and width Γ < 24 MeV/c2 is observed in the invariant-mass spectrum of the pK S 0 system at a statistical significance of 5.6σ. The mass and the width of this resonance correspond to the recently found positive-strangeness Θ+ baryon, which was predicted to be an exotic baryon consisting of five quarks (pentaquark), \(uudd\bar s\). The total cross section for the production of a Θ+ baryon in pA interactions is estimated at a value within the range 30–120 μb for xF ≥ 0. An analysis of the A dependence of the cross section for Θ+-baryon production does not reveal a significant deviation from the A dependence for inelastic events (∼A0.7).