Status of the CMS Silicon Strip Tracker and Commissioning Results

The main subsystems of the CMS Tracker have been assembled together in a dedicated large clean room at CERN, prior to the installation in CMS. Following the integration of the Tracker a long commissioning period took place, during which, up to 15% of the silicon modules were operated and read out simultaneously at different temperatures. Some of the achievements of this commissioning phase are discussed in details, like Tracker noise performance, signal-to-noise measurements and hit reconstruction efficiency. The Tracker was inserted in CMS in December 2007 and the commissioning of the full Tracker started. A sketch of the commissioning procedure followed at CMS and the actual status of the Tracker are presented. Presented at PSD8: 8th International Conference on Position Sensitive Detectors,1-5 September, 2008,Glasgow,United Kingdom