Fabrication and testing of clear lightguide fiber bundles for the D-Zero prototype fiber tracker cosmic ray test

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Abstract
Recent advances have made scintillating-fiber technology a prominent choice for charged- particle tracking systems for high-energy physics. Such a system, containing some 81 K fibers, is planned for the 1997 upgrade of the D0 detector at Fermilab. As part of this project, a large-scale prototype containing 3072 channels has been designed and constructed. The prototype, which emulates many of the aspects of the planned upgrade tracker, is currently being tested with cosmic rays. An important feature of the prototype, as of the upgrade tracker, are clear plastic fibers, grouped into bundles, which transport scintillation light from the detector's scintillating fibers to remotely located visible-light photon counter (VLPC) photodetectors. Each of these lightguide bundles is 8 m long and contains 128 Kuraray clear multiclad fibers of 965 micrometers diameter terminated in an 128-channel optical connector at each end. This paper describes the details of the design, fabrication, and testing of 27 such bundles containing a total of 3456 channels and employing almost 17 miles of fiber. Excluding one bundle which appears to have been damaged in handling, the bad-channel frequency was found to be 0.2%, and the light loss per channel resulting from insertion of a bundle (and its two connectors) was measured to be about 5 dB. The results of these measurements validate the design and construction procedures used, and it is expected that similar procedures will be employed in fabricating more than 600 such clear lightguide bundles for the scintillating-fiber tracker for the 1997 upgrade of the D0 detector.

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