A NEW INSTRUMENT FOR HIGH STATISTICS MEASUREMENT OF SCINTILLATING FIBERS

The large scale use of scintillating optical fibers in particle detect ors is now starting, with the advent of lead-scintillating fiber calor imeters and their use in physics experiments. With respect to the use of scintillating fibers for the tracking of particle trajectories clos e to the interacting point, in this application we face very massive d etectors and a very large quantity of scintillating fibers. On the oth er hand, their diameter does not need to be particularly small, as in the case of particle tracking when a good space resolution is required . The CHORUS Collaboration is presently building a new detector for th e search of nu(mu) - nu(tau) oscillations on the CERN neutrino beam. A crucial task in the detector is ruled by the high energy resolution c alorimeter. For its construction more than 400000 scintillating plasti c fibers have been used. Here we report on the characteristics and per formance of a new instrument for high statistics measurement of the fi ber properties in terms of light output and attenuation length of the light.