Fast particle discriminator based on matched filters

A fast discriminator for high-energy particles is developed using matched filters. It is based on analysing the time structure of electron and pion signals from a scintillating fiber calorimeter, a detector that measures the energy of the particles. The discriminator is able to achieve discrimination responses within 100 ns and for a beam energy of 80 GeV, less than 0.05% of pions are misclassified as electrons for an electron efficiency of more than 99%. This represents as improvement of more than 50% in the discrimination efficiency obtained by using a standard constant fraction discriminator.