Calibration and performances of the full-scale ΔE-TOF prototype of the FOOT experiment

FOOT (FragmentatiOn Of Target) is an applied nuclear physics experiment aiming to perform cross section measurements for nuclear fragmentation reactions of interest in particle therapy and radioprotection in space. An important component of the apparatus is the ΔE-TOF system, composed of two scintillation detectors and dedicated to the charge identification of nuclear fragments. The first full-scale prototype of this system was tested in 2019 at CNAO (Pavia, Italy) with protons and 12C ions and at GSI (Darmstadt, Germany) with 16O beams. We developed a calibration procedure for the detectors and validated it with Monte Carlo simulations. As a result the system showed promising performances, reaching energy and time resolutions of 3.9–5% and 50–84 ps for 12C and16O beams, respectively. The ΔE-TOF was then employed for the first time to identify the charge of nuclear fragments produced by a 400MeV/u 16O beam impinging on a 5mm thick graphite target