Development of the CMS tracker and reconstruction of secondary vertices of B- and C-hadrons

In this dissertation the performance of the CMS experiment to reconstruct secondary vertices originating from b- and c-hadrons has been investigated. CMS is one of the four detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The physical properties of vertices and the vertex reconstruction algorithms are shown. The performance of the vertex reconstruction and of the identification of b-jets (b-tagging) are investigated. It is shown that the performance of a vertex algorithm, developed in the context of this thesis, is higher than that of the CMS standard algorithm. The CMS tracker is the most important detector component for the vertex reconstruction. Two probe stations for the quality assurance of silicon strip sensors have been designed and constructed within this dissertation