Three dimensional photograph of single electron tracks through a scintillator

Abstract

The reconstruction of particle trajectories makes it possible to distinguish between different types of charged particles. In high-energy physics, where trajectories are rather long, large size trackers must be used to achieve sufficient position resolution. However, in low-background experiments tracks are rather short and three dimensional trajectories could only be resolved in time-projection chambers so far. For detectors of large volume and therefore large drift distances, which are inevitable for low-background experiments, this technique is limited by diffusion of charge carriers. In this work we present a "proof-of-principle" experiment for a new method for the three dimensional tracking of charged particles by scintillation light: We used a setup consisting of a scintillator, mirrors, lenses and a novel imaging device (the hybrid photo detector) in order to image two projections of electron tracks through the scintillator. We took data at the T-24 beam-line at DESY with relativistic electrons with a kinetic energy of 5 GeV and from this data successfully reconstructed their three dimensional propagetion path in the scintillator. With our setup we achieved a position resolution of about 28 mum in the best case.