Thermoluminescent sheets for the detection of high energy hadronic and electromagnetic showers

Abstract A new detector, the thermoluminescent (TL) sheet, has been developed by using a new thermoluminescent powder. BaSO 4 : Eu, for the study of hadronic and electromagnetic cascade showers in ultrahigh energy interactions. The TL sheet is an effective detector because of the following advantages: high sensitivity for the detection of cascade showers (around 1 TeV), high position resolution of about 50 μm, wide dynamic range over seven orders of magnitude and little thermal fading of the TL latent signal. Moreover, the TL sheet can be used repeatedly by annealing.