Performance of very thin Gd₂SiO₅ scintillator bars for the LHCf experiment

To increase the radiation resistivity of the calorimeter, the LHCf group plans to replace its plastic scintillator with Gd₂SiO₅ (GSO) scintillator. In this report, we present the basic performance of very thin GSO scintillator bars that will replace the scintillating fibers employed as the position sensitive part of the current LHCf detector. The size of a bar is 1 mm × 1 mm × 40 mm. White acrylic paint was painted on one group of GSO bars and a second group was unpainted. After observing a clear peak of cosmic ray muons corresponding to 3 to 4 photoelectrons, a quantitative test was performed by using a 290 MeV/n carbon beam at HIMAC in Japan. The non-painted bars have less position dependence of light collection efficiency (effective attenuation length is about 140 mm) and less piece-to-piece variation. The unpainted bars show about 8% cross talk between adjacent bars which is larger than the painted ones. However, for estimating the center of a cascade shower inside the calorimeter, uniformity of light collection is more important than cross talk, so we have decided to use non-painted bars in the LHCf detector. A simulation of a 100 GeV electron injected in the center of the detector shows that position dependence and cross talk cause only a 0.04 mm shift of the shower centroid without any correction applied. This shows that these effects are relatively small compared to the uncertainty of the beam center position which was 1 mm for the LHCf experiments already performed at s =7 TeV.