Ricerc@Sapienza

The correct quantification of the dose released in charged particle therapy treatments requires the knowledge of the double differential fragmentation cross section of particles composing both beam and target. The FOOT experiment aims at measuring these cross sections for ions of interest for charged particle therapy applications. The paper describes the performance of the TOF-Wall detector of the experiment. The detector is composed of two layers of 44 cm x 2 cm x 3 mm plastic scintillator bars (20 for each layer), arranged orthogonally and read out by silicon photomultipliers.

In particle physics charged particles are measured exploiting many different detection strategies. The plastic scintillators are cheap, versatile and show good time response, thus are traditionally employed as timing detectors. TOPS (Time Of flight Plastic Scintillators) is an R&D project devoted to the synthesis and characterization of a novel class of plastic scintillators. Liquid and solid sam- ples of tens of new scintillators have been tested and characterized.