A semiconductor-scintillation telescope using a single photodiode

A novel type of detector telescope suited for charged particle identification is proposed. It consists of a large area silicon PIN diode optically coupled to a CsI(Tl) crystal having about the same cross section as the silicon detector: the peculiarity of the proposed telescope is that the silicon detector acts as a ΔE element and at the same time as a photosensitive device for the fluorescence light produced in the crystal by the penetrating particle. A proper filtering of the signal has been used in order to reconstruct the complementary information (ΔE and Eres) from the composite output waveform of the charge preamplifier coupled to the silicon detector. Prototypes of the telescope have been built and used to detect light particles produced in heavy ion collisions at low (8 MeV/n) and high (300 MeV/n) bombarding energies; results are presented and discussed.