Radiation damage studies for the BaBar Silicon Vertex Tracker

The Silicon Vertex Tracker of the BaBar experiment is a five-layer, double-sided AC-coupled silicon microstrip detector operating on the PEP-II storage ring at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. After more than four years of running, the silicon sensors and the front-end electronics in the inner layer have absorbed radiation doses up to 2Mrad. In this paper we present results from radiation hardness tests and discuss the implications of the absorbed radiation dose on the Silicon Vertex Tracker lifetime.