The silicon Multiplicity Detector for the NA50 experiment

The operation and performance of the silicon strip Multiplicity Detector in the heavy-ion experiment NA50 at CERN are presented together with a selection of physics results. The main features of the detector are high speed (50 MHz sampling frequency), high granularity (more than 13,000 strips), and good radiation resistance. The detector provided a measurement of event centrality in Pb–Pb collisions, as well as target identification and the measurement of charged particle pseudorapidity distributions as a function of centrality.