Development of a real-time, large area, high spatial resolution particle tracker based on scintillating fibers

The design of a detector for tracking charged particles is presented together with the characterization techniques developed toextract the main design specifications. The goals for the final detector are to achieve real-time imaging performances, a largedetection area, and a high spatial resolution, particularly suitable for medical imaging applications. This paper describes theprototype of the tracker plane,which has a 20 × 20 cm2 sensitive area consisting of two crossed ribbons of 500 msquare scintillatingfibers. The information about the hit position extracted real-time tracker in an innovative way, using a reduced number of the readoutchannels to obtain a very large detection area but with moderate costs and complexity.The performances of the tracker havebeen investigated using sources, cosmic rays, and a 62MeV proton beam.