The DELPHI Microvertex Detector at LEP

In the Large Electron and Positron (LEP) collider era, quark tagging and spectroscopy of short-lived particles demanded high-precision tracking with flavour tagging possibilities via the second vertex identification method. Taking the success of silicon sensors in NA11 (see Sect.  4.2 ) and MARKII [1] into account, silicon was the obvious candidate for the innermost tracking detector complemented by drift chambers and/or time projection chambers at larger radii.