Performance characteristics and radiation damage results from the Fermilab E706 silicon microstrip detector system

A charged particle spectrometer containing a 7120-channel silicon microstrip detector system, one component of Fermilab experiment E706 to study direct photon production in hadron-hadron collisions, was utilized in a run in which 6 million events were recorded. We describe the silicon system, provide early results of track and vertex reconstruction, and present data on the radiation damage to the silicon wafers resulting from the narrow high intensity beam.