Barrel silicon vertex tracker for PHENIX at RHIC

The barrel silicon vertex tracker has been proposed as an upgrade project of the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The prime motivation for this new detector is to provide precision measurements of heavy-quark production (charm and beauty) in A + A, p(d) + A, and polarized p + p collisions. The current design of the silicon vertex tracker comprises a four-layer barrel detector, built from two internal layers of pixel detectors and two external layers of projective "stripixels" which complement the central spectrometer arms of PHENIX. In this paper, the physics motivation of the silicon vertex tracker upgrade and the concept of the new detector will be discussed. Moreover, the status of the new development and beginning production of the silicon detectors will be presented.