Use of transition radiation detectors (TRD's) for B tagging/triggering in future collider or fixed target experiments

Transition Radiation Detectors (TRD's) have been used successfully for particle identification in high energy physics experiments over approximately the last ten years. They have been utilized in a variety of experimental environments, including the Intersecting Storage Rings at CERN, hadron collider experiments at the CERN SppS and at the Fermilab Tevatron, and an internal gas jet target experiment at the CERN SppS as well as fixed target experiments at both laboratories. The primary application has been electron identification, but, more recently, they have been used to identify hadrons as well, including both primary beam particles and secondaries in the very forward region of a multiparticle spectrometer. These versatile detectors show great promise for use in the identification of B decay products in future heavy quark experiments at hadron accelerators. While their anticipated role in the central or moderately forward region of the collider would be to identify electrons, in fixed target or in the very forward collider region, they would be expected instead to discriminate among hadron species. This is because the total TR energy radiated is proportional to the Lorentz factor, γ, of the the charged particle. Thus, a TRD which open-quote turns on close-quote for electrons between 1 and 2 GeV demonstrates the same response to pions only when they reach an energy of 250-500 GeV