Time of flight detector

A time of flight detector is a particle detector which can discriminate between a lighter and a heavier elementary particle of same momentum using their time of flight between two scintillators. The first of the scintillators activates a clock upon being hit while the other stops the clock upon being hit. If the two masses are denoted by $m 1$ and $m 2$ and have velocities $v 1$ and $v 2$ then the time of flight difference is given by

$\delta t = L\left(\frac{1}{v_1}-\frac{1}{v_2}\right)\approx \frac{Lc}{2p^2}(m_1^2-m_2^2)$

where $L$ is the distance between the scintillators. The approximation is in the relativistic limit at momentum $p$ and $c$ denotes the speed of light in vacuum.

Categories: Big Science