Optical adapters to improve the collection efficiency of the Multi-Anode Photo-Multipliers detectors

Aim of this work is to describe the optical system developed, with ray-tracing simulations, to improve the collection efficiency of MultiAnode Photo-Multipliers (MAPMTs) detectors from Hamamatsu corp., used in nuclear, cosmic-rays and neutrino physics experiments. These optical collectors have imaging and filtering capability. Such characteristics allow to improve the collection efficiency of detectors, focusing all photons inside the sensitive area, and also to improve the signal-to-noise ratio by limiting the wave lengths band to the region of interest. These filtering properties allow to avoid background photons from nearby spectral regions and they are studied to minimize the wavelength shifting in comparison with the increasing of the incident angle. The spectrum of transmissivity have been realized with high transparency in wavelength range of interest and with a sharp cutoff outside. In this work, the application on different typologies of PMT have been studied. Particularly, the collection efficiency of the 64-channel PMT was improved from 45% to 75% using our optical adapters. On an electrostatic-focusing PMT, with an efficiency of 74%, the application of our innovative solutions have enhanced this efficiency exceeding 90%, including the band pass filter and keeping the mass below 25 g. First prototypes have been fabricated. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.