Time-of-flight detector

{{Short description|Particle detector}}{{onesource|date=December 2009}}

A time-of-flight (TOF) detector is a particle detector which can discriminate between a lighter and a heavier elementary particle of same momentum using their time of flight between two scintillators.{{Cite web |title=TOF Detector {{!}} Hamamatsu Photonics |url=https://hep.hamamatsu.com/eu/en/detector-type/tof-detector.html |access-date=2024-11-25 |website=hep.hamamatsu.com |language=en}} The first of the scintillators activates a clock upon being hit while the other stops the clock upon being hit. If the two masses are denoted by $m\_1$and $m\_2$ and have velocities $v\_1$ and $v\_2$ then the time of flight difference is given by

:$\backslash Delta\; t\; =\; L\backslash left(\backslash frac\{1\}\{v\_1\}-\backslash frac\{1\}\{v\_2\}\backslash right)\backslash approx\; \backslash frac\{Lc\}\{2p^2\}(m\_1^2-m\_2^2)$

where $L$ is the distance between the scintillators. The approximation is in the relativistic limit at momentum $p$ and $c$ denotes the speed of light in vacuum.