Buried plastic scintillator muon telescope (BATATA)

ALFARO-MOLINA, R.; DE DONATO, C.; D'OLIVO, J.C.; GUZMAN, A.; MEDINA-TANCO, G.; MORENO-BARBOSA, E.; PAIC, G.; PATINO-SALAZAR, M.E.; SALAZAR-IBARGUEN, H.; SANCHEZ, F.; SUPANITSKY, D.A.; VALDES-GALICIA, J. F.; VARGAS-TREVINO, M.A.; VERGARA-LIMON, S.; VILLASENOR, L.M.; AUGER COLLABORATION

La Biodola, Pisa, Italiia

Congreso; 11th Pisa Meeting On Advanced Detectors: Frontier Detectors For Frontier Physics; 2009

Muon telescopes have multiple applications in the area of cosmic ray research. We are currently building such a detector with the objective of comparing the ground penetration of muon vs. electron- gamma signals originated in cosmic ray showers. The detector is composed by a set of three parallel dual-layer scintillator planes, buried at fixed depths ranging from 120 to 600 g/cm2 . Each layer is 4 m2 and is composed by 49 rectangular strips of 4 cm x 2 m, oriented at a 903 angle with respect to its companion layer, which gives an xy-coincidence pixel of 4 x 4cm2. The scintillators are MINOS extruded polystyrene strips, with an embedded Bicron BC92 wavelength shifting (WLS) fibers, of 1.5 mm in diameter. Light is collected by Hamamatsu H7546B multi-anode PMTs of 64 pixels. The front- end (FE) electronics works in counting mode and signals are transmitted to the surface DAQ stage using low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS). Any strip signal above threshold opens a GPS-tagged 2 ms data collection window. Data, including signal and background, are acquired by a system of FPGA (Spartan 2E) boards and a single-board computer (TS7800).