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The GSO scintillator has a very excellent radiation resistance, fast decay time and large amounts of light yield. Because of these features, GSO will be used to upgrade the current LHCf detector. We examined the features of GSO by using heavy ion beam at Heavy Ion Medical Accelerator in Chiba (HIMAC) Japan. The linearity of PMT R7400 for the large light yield of GSO with a 132Xe beam and the radiation hardness with a 12C beam were measured. As a result, GSO scintillator showed a good linearity up to the signal corresponding to 6 TeV EM-shower maximum in the LHCf detector, and a good radiation hardness up to 7×105 Gy. For the LHCf Arm1 detector, small scaled GSO crystals (GSO bars), have been fabricated for the position determination detector. 5 GSO bars have been manufactured and its performance have been evaluated using 12C beam. Its light yield and position dependency have been evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The SPD (Scintillator Pad Detector) is a part of LHCb calorimeter which is designed to distinguish electrons and photons for this first level trigger. This detector is a plastic scintillator layer, divided in about 6000 cells of different size to obtain better granularity near the beam. Charged particles will produce, and photons will not, ionisation on the scintillator. This ionisation generates a light pulse that is collected by a Wavelength Shifting (WLS) fibre that is twisted inside the scintillator cell. The light is transmitted through a clear fibre to the readout system. For cost reduction, these 6000 cells are divided in groups using a MAPMT of 64 channels for receiving information in the readout system. The signal outing the SPD PMTs is rather unpredictable as a result of the low photostatistics, 20–30 photoelectrons per MIP, and the response of the WLS fibre, which has low decay time. Then, the signal processing must be performed by first integrating the total charge and later subtracting to avoid pile-up. The SPD Readout system is performed by an ASIC which integrates the signal, makes the pile-up compensation, and compares the level obtained to a programmable threshold (distinguishing electrons and photons), an FPGA which programmes the ASIC thresholds and pile-up subtraction and finally LVDS serializers, in order to send information to the first level trigger system. The design of the VFE unit takes into account not only mechanical constraints, as a result of the little space for the readout electronics but also the radiation quote expected in the environment and the distance between the VFE electronics and the racks were information is sent. © 2006 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]