Particle tracking with scintillating fibres

This article presents our R&D-work on particle tracking with scintillating fibres. We have developed new fibre dyes, more efficient fibre cladding, coherent fibre bundles with improved packing fraction and a new fibre readout technique (ISPA-tube). Altogether, these new developments increased the hit density of fine grain (60 µm) fibres by about 7 times. This results in mini-tracks per 2.5 mm fibre layer rather than in single hits only and enhances the track reconstruction efficiency to nearly 100 %. Compared with competing tracking methods (silicon strips, MSGCs), our scintillating fibres are superior in hit numbers per radiation length and in the 2-track resolution. They require much less readout channels and consequently no cooling provisions to remove their electronic heat.