Amadeus - a new type of large area scintillation detector with position-, energy- and time-of-flight determination

The Amadeus detector consists of a scintillator plate, a Plexiglas plate and a matrix of photomultiplier tubes oriented opposite to the particle direction. A charged particle traversing the scintillator emits scintillation light which is seen only by the nearby phototubes. In a first approximation the sum of the pulse height seen by these tubes is proportional to the deposited energy and the center of gravity of the detected light distribution corresponds to the particle impact position. This approximation allows a fast determination of particle parameters with sufficient accuracy for online applications. In connection with the time-of-flight the particle identification and the complete determination of the four-momentum vector is given. For the off-line analysis a more refined algorithm can be used resulting in energy-, position- and time-of-flight resolution values in the range of σ_x = 3–5 mm σ_E = 3–5 MeV, σ₁ = 150–250 ps, respectively.