HEAVY FLAVOR PHYSICS AT COLLIDERS WITH SILICON STRIP VERTEX DETECTORS

The physics of heavy flavours has played a dominant role in high energ y physics research ever since the discovery of charm in 1974, followed by the tau lepton in 1975 and bottom in 1977. With the startup of the large experiments at the e+e-colliders LEP and the SLC a new type of detector system has now come into operation which has a major impact o n the studies of heavy flavours: the silicon strip vertex detector. Th e basic design principles of these novel detector systems are outlined and three representative experimental realizations are discussed. The impact of these detectors on the studies of the properties of heavy f lavours is just emerging and focuses on the measurement of lifetimes a nd the tagging of the presence of heavy flavour hadrons in hadronic ev ents. The tools that are being developed for these studies are describ ed as well as details of representative analyses. The potential of the se devices and the associated technological developments that were nec essary for their application in the colliding beam environment is refl ected in a plethora of new proposals to build sophisticated silicon de tector systems for a large variety of future high energy physics appli cations. Two examples will be briefly sketched, a vertex detector for an asymmetric e+e- bottom factory and a large scale tracking system fo r a multipurpose detector at one of the new large hadron colliders.