The sampling grid scintillator: A new absolutely calibrated intensity monitor for intense high energy charged particle beams

We have developed and tested a novel detector to accurately measure the absolute flux of charged particles in an intense high energy charged particle beam. The detector consists of a square grid of small scintillation fibers, embedded in a transparent acrylic matrix, coupled to two photomultiplier tubes. When charged particles traverse the detector, a well defined fraction of them produce counts. The regular spatial sampling grid makes the corresponding sampling error extremely small. We have demonstrated that this detector can measure the absolute intensity of a beam 35 times too intense for an equivalent solid scintillator, and can readily yield 1% accuracy with only routine effort. (orig.)