The Silicon Vertex Detector of the Belle II experiment

The Silicon Vertex Detector (SVD) is a part of the vertex detector in the Belle II experiment at the SuperKEKB collider (KEK, Japan). Since the start of data taking in spring 2019, the SVD has been operating stably and reliably with a high signal-to-noise ratio and hit efficiency, achieving good spatial resolution and high track reconstruction efficiency. The hit occupancy, which mostly comes from the beam-related background, is currently about 0.5% in the innermost layer, causing no impact on the SVD performance. In anticipation of the operation at higher luminosity in the following years, two strategies to sustain the tracking performance in future high beam background conditions have been developed and tested on data. One is to reduce the number of signal waveform samples to decrease dead time, data size, and occupancy. The other is to utilize the good hit-time resolution to reject the beam background hits. We also measured the radiation effects on the full depletion voltage, sensor current, and strip noise caused during the first two and a half years of operation. The results show no detrimental effect on the SVD performance.