Scintillation hodoscopes for time-of-flight measurements

Abstract The performances of the TOF scintillation counters used in the SIGMA-AIAKS spectrometer are presented. The counters, made of NE110, are 150, 65 and 10 cm long, 10 cm wide and 1.5 cm thick. The time resolutions for minimum ionizing particles have been measured to be σ t = 0.18 ns, 0.14 ns and 0.11 ns respectively. The main contribution to the resolution is given by the photoe collection statistics determined by the decay time of the scintillator and the difference of the optical paths in the counter. The scintillation counters, assembled into hodoscopes of 1.5 × 3.2 m 2 and 0.65 × 0.8 m 2 are used for identification of particles through the TOF. The algorithms of off-line data processing are also presented.