A beam position fiber counter with scintillation fibers and multi-pixel photon counter for high intensity beam operation

A beam position fiber counter consisting of the scintillation fiber (Kuraray SCSF-78 M) and a multi-pixel photon counter (HPK S10362-11-100P) was developed in order to handle a 10 MHz secondary pion beam in the J-PARC E40 experiment. This counter was installed at the entrance of the beam line spectrometer at the K1.8 experimental area in J-PARC and used for the momentum reconstruction. In order to suppress the accidental background and reconstruct the beam momentum, a good timing resolution better than 0.8 ns (σ) and a good position resolution better than 200μm were simultaneously required for the counter. These requirements were well achieved by reading the 320 fibers with a diameter of 1 mm, which were arranged in a staggered position, with MPPC fiber by fiber. The signal induced from each MPPC was handled with an Extended Analogue SiPM Integrated ReadOut Chip (EASIROC) developed by Omega/IN2P3 in France. In addition, the timing of the discriminated signals from EASIROC was measured by a FPGA-based multi-hit TDC implemented into Spartan-6. Finally, we obtained the timing resolution of 0.68 ns (σ) and the position resolution of 190μm (σ) under the 9 MHz beam condition using a pion beam.