Session UB04 - Instrumentation for Nuclear Physics I.
ORAL session, Thursday morning, March 25
Room 204E, GWCC
BRAHMS is one of the four experiments that will begin operation with the startup of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The BRAHMS Multiplicity Detector will provide a characterization of the charged-particle multiplicity on an event-by-event basis. This information will be used to develop a first-level trigger for the experiment and for subsequent off-line sorting. The detector consists of a two barrel arrangement around the interaction vertex with an inner array of 24, modestly segmented Si strip detectors (seven strips per wafer) and an outer array of 40 scintillator tiles with fiber-optic readout. Each active detector element will be traversed by a large number of particles in a given event. Consequently, charged-particle multiplicities will be deduced from pulse-height measurements based on the expected average energy loss for a single particle passing through a given detector element. The expected performance of the multiplicity detector and its current status will be presented.