Commissioning and performance of the CMS silicon microstrip detector

The CMS silicon strip tracker is the largest device of this type ever built for detection of charged particles produced in beam-beam collisions. There are 24244 single-sided micro-strip sensors covering an active area of over 200 square meters, and nearly 10 million channels to be read out. The detector was installed inside CMS in December 2007, and it was commissioned during the summer 2008. Since then a large quantity of cosmic ray data has been collected and its performance have been assessed in combined operation with all other CMS sub-detectors. The commissioning strategy, the operational experience acquired during the data taking period, and the detector performance results are reported in this paper.