DETECTOR BASED ON SCINTILLATING OPTICAL FIBERS FOR CHARGED PARTICLES TRACKING WITH APPLICATION IN THE REALIZATION OF A RESIDUAL RANGE DETECTOR EMPLOYING A READ-OUT CHANNELS REDUCTION AND COMPRESSION METHOD

The invention relates to charged-particle segmented strip detectors, in which the strips comprise one or more scintillating fibers and the fibers are arranged in the form of a strip and are folded onto themselves so as to form a loop with a bending radius which is <=100 times the diameter or the side size, in the case of square cross-sections, and the strip is folded so that its end portions form an angle 0<=alpha<=90 DEG beyond the curvature, said end portions being superimposed in the case where the angle is alpha <> 0 or parallel and spaced in the case where alpha = 0. These detectors may be one-dimensional or two-dimensional position detectors or tracking detectors and may be combined with residual range detectors.; The invention also relates to compression of the number of read-out channels of these detectors obtained by means of suitable grouping of the fibers at the two read-out ends thereof, obtaining a compression factor equal to 2[square root of]N, where N = the number of read-out channels of the fibers, in quadruple coincidence. The detectors according to the invention are applicable to apparatus for radiography or tomography using charged particles.