Construction and tests of a fine granularity lead-scintillating fibers calorimeter

We report the construction and the tests of a small prototype of the lead-scintillating fiber calorimeter of the KLOE experiment, instrumented with multianode photomultipliers to obtain a 16 times finer readout granularity. The prototype is 15 cm wide, 15 radiation lengths deep and is made of 200 layers of fibers 50 cm long. On one side it is read out with an array of 3x5 multianode photomultipliers Hamamatsu type R8900-M16, each segmented with 4x4 anodes, the read out granularity being 240 pixels of 11 x 11 mm(2) corresponding to about 64 scintillating fibers each. These are interfaced to the 6 x 6 mm(2) pixeled photocathode with truncated pyramid light guides made of Bicron BC-800 plastic to partially transmit the UV light. Each photomultiplier provides also an OR of the 16 last dynodes that is used for trigger. The response of the individual anodes, their relative gain and cross-talk has been measured with the light (440 nm) of a laser illuminating only few fibers on the side opposite to the readout. We finally present the first results of the calorimeter response to cosmic rays in auto-trigger mode.