Development of a scintillation-fiber detector for real-time particle tracking

The prototype of the OFFSET (Optical Fiber Folded Scintillating Extended Tracker) tracker is presented. It exploits a novel system for particle tracking, designed to achieve real-time imaging, large detection areas, and a high spatial resolution especially suitable for use in medical diagnostics. The main results regarding the system architecture have been used as a demonstration of the technique which has been patented by the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). The prototype of this tracker, presented in this paper, has a 20 × 20 cm2 sensitive area, consisting of two crossed ribbons of 500 micron square scintillating fibers. The track position information is extracted in real time in an innovative way, using a reduced number of read-out channels to obtain very large detection area with moderate enough costs and complexity. The performance of the tracker was investigated using beta sources, cosmic rays, and a 62 MeV proton beam.