Development of silicon drift detectors for strangeness measurements

Detection of multi-strange and charm particles requires precise measurements of the secondary vertices close to the interaction point and the decay products of strange and charm particles. This presents an unprecedented challenge for relativistic heavy ion experiments, where multiplicity reaches thousands of final state particles per collision. Development of affordable technology for realizing high spatial resolution and low mass vertex detectors has become the ultimate goal of many R&D projects in major laboratories. In this paper we present preliminary results on silicon drift detectors fabricated for the first time on p-type silicon substrates. These detectors were designed, fabricated and tested recently at LBL and show very interesting properties which make their use in future experiments very likely