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What is Time of Flight – TOF Detector – Definition

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Time of flight detectors (TOF) determine charged particle velocity by measuring the time required to travel from the interaction point to the time of flight detector, or between two detectors. As was written, scintillation counters (especially with organic scintillators) can provide excellent time resolution and therefore they can be used as a time of flight detector to discriminate between a lighter and a heavier elementary particle of same momentum using their time of flight. The first of the scintillators activates a clock upon being hit while the other stops the clock upon being hit. If the two masses are denoted by m1 and m2 and have velocities v1 and v2 then the time of flight difference is given by:

Time of Flight - TOF Detector

These detectors can be also used to measure time of flight for reaching some scintillation counter located at a distance L from the point of origin of the particle to determine the velocity and therefore the rest mass of the particle, thus they can be used for particle separation.

time of flight - detector
Distribution of β as measured by the TOF detector as a function of momentum for particles reaching TOF in p–Pb interactions. ALICE experiment LHC Cern.
Source: Particle Detectors; Raffaella De Vita; INFN – Sezione di Genova
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See also:

Radiation Detection

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