ENSTAR detector: fabrication and test measurement

A large acceptance plastic scintillator detector ENSTAR has been designed and built at BARC, Mumbai. The detector will be used for studies of a new type of nuclear matter- the η-mesic nucleus, at the multi-GeV hadron facility COSY (COoler SYnchrotron), Juelich, Germany. The ENSTAR design has been optimized for detecting decay products of eta-nucleus bound state (η-mesic nucleus), namely protons and pions. However, it can also be used in other experiments whereever missing mass determination in a reaction has to be done in coincidence with decay products. The detector is made of plastic scintillators arranged in three concentric cylindrical layers. These layers will be used to generate ΔE - E spectra for particle identification and total energy information for the stopped particles. Each layer is sub-divided into a number of pieces to obtain θ and φ information. The scintillator read-out is made through state-of-the-art fiber optic technique. The present report describes fabrication details such as machining the scintillators, polishing the scintillators and the fibers and coupling the fibers with scintillators and photomultiplier tubes. Test measurements have been performed with proton beam from the COSY accelerator at Juelich, the results of which are reported. (author)