Three-dimensional photograph of electron tracks through a plastic scintillator

The reconstruction of particle trajectories makes it possible to distinguish between different types of charged particles. In high-energy physics, where trajectories are rather long (several meters), large size trackers must be used to achieve sufficient position resolution. However, in low-background experiments like the search for neutrinoless double beta decay, tracks are rather short (some mm to several cm, depending on the detector in use) and three-dimensional trajectories could only be resolved in gaseous time-projection chambers so far. For detectors of a large volume of around one cubic meter (large in the scope of neutrinoless double beta search) and therefore large drift distances (several decimeters to 1 m), this technique is limited by diffusion and repulsion of charge carriers. In this work we present a “proof-of-principle” experiment for a new method of the three-dimensional tracking of charged particles by scintillation light: we used a setup consisting of a scintillator, mirrors, lenses, and a novel imaging device (the hybrid photon detector) in order to image two projections of electron tracks through the scintillator. We took data at the T-22 beamline at DESY with relativistic electrons with a kinetic energy of 5 GeV and from this data successfully reconstructed their three-dimensional propagation path in the scintillator. With our setup we achieved a position resolution in the range of 170–248 µm.