Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 472 (2001) 460–463 Neutrino tracking calorimetry with plastic scintillator bars Gianrossano Giannini a , Giovanni Santin a, *, Mario Spinetti b , Lucia Votano b , Kerstin Hoepfner c a University & INFN Trieste Via Valerio 2, 34127 Trieste, Italy b INFN Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati - Italy c Hamburg University and DESY - Germany Abstract The technique of plastic scintillator bars coupled to wavelength shifting fibers is proposed for neutrino tracking calorimeters, in the context of very large, massive detectors for experiments on the neutrino factory beam. A prototype has been built with 180 scintillator bars interleaved with an equal number of iron bars. The light from the fibers is collected by multi-anode PMTs and converted with Amplitude–Time–Pattern self-triggering digitizing electronics. The prototype has been tested with electron and pion beams at CERN. r 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PACS: 29.40.Nc; 29.40.Vj Keywords: Neutrino oscillations; Calorimeters; Scintillation detectors 1. Introduction Neutrino experiments in general require large volume, and large mass detectors to compensate for the small interaction cross-section. Even considering very high energy neutrinos, as in the case of the proposed neutrino factory projects, we need many kton apparata with quite good granularity, to distinguish the event ‘‘shape’’ and precisely measure the deposited energy, including that of the hadronic part of the showers. The use of iron/scintillator detectors, and in particular of plastic scintillator bars is then favored because of the low cost per mass unit and the ease of construction factors [2]. For the required size and in order to manufac- ture several hundred tons of scintillators, new production technologies like injection molding or extrusion need to be optimized fulfilling the high qualitative requirements. Several meters of long bars have to cope with light attenuation and absorption within the bar. Calorimetry is the most promising application of the new scintillator technology allowing to accurately reconstruct shower energy as well as for e=p separation. This is of great importance especially in neutrino physics where the recon- struction of neutrino direction and energy relies on its decay products, muons and electromagnetic and hadronic showers. We describe the construction (funded by INFN within the NUTEST project) of an iron/scintillator prototype and a test on a beam of electrons and *Corresponding author. E-mail address: giovanni.santin@ts.infn.it (G. Santin). 0168-9002/01/$-see front matter r 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII:S0168-9002(01)01292-X