The CDFII Time-of-Flight detector and impact on beauty flavor tagging

The new CDFII detector incorporates a Time-of-Flight detector (TOF), employing plastic scintillator bars and fine-mesh photomultipliers. Since August 2001 the TOF system has been fully instrumented and integrated into the CDFII data acquisition system. With a design goal of 100 ps resolution the TOF system will provide at least two standard deviations separation between K± and π± for momenta p < 1.6 GeV/c, complementing low momentum particle identification by means of the specific ionization energy loss measured in the drift chamber. We describe the design of the TOF detector and discuss the current status of its calibration and initial performances. Finally we review the expected impact of the TOF detector in the flavor tagging of neutral Bs0 meson