Beam test of silicon strip sensors for the ZEUS micro vertex detector

For the HERA upgrade, the ZEUS experiment has designed and installed a high precision Micro Vertex Detector (MVD) using single sided p-strip sensors with capacitive charge division. The sensors have a readout pitch of 120 pm, with five intermediate strips (20 mum strip pitch). An extensive test program has been carried out at the DESY-II testbeam facility. In this paper we describe the setup developed to test the ZEUS MVD sensors and the results obtained on both irradiated and non-irradiated single sided V-strip detectors with rectangular and trapezoidal geometries. The performances of the sensors coupled to the readout electronics (HELIX chip, version 2.2) have been studied in detail, achieving a good description by a Monte Carlo simulation. Measurements of the position resolution as a function of the angle of incidence are presented, focusing in particular on the comparison between standard and newly developed reconstruction algorithms.