An instrument for the high-statistics measurement of plastic scintillating fibers

There is today widespread use of plastic scintillating fibers in particle physics, mainly for calorimetric and tracking applications. In the case of calorimeters, we have to cope with very massive detectors and a large quantity of scintillating fibers. The CHORUS Collaboration has built a new detector to search for νμ-ντ oscillations in the CERN neutrino beam. A crucial task of the detector is ruled by the high-energy resolution calorimeter. For its construction more than 400 000 scintillating plastic fibers have been used. In this paper we report on the design and performance of a new instrument for the high-statistics measurement of the fiber properties, in terms of light yield and light attenuation length. The instrument has been successfully used to test about 3% of the total number of fibers before the construction of the calorimeter. ((orig.))