Construction and performance of a cylindrical scintillating fiber detector for experiment 835 at FNAL

A tracking detector made of scintillating fibers has been built for the Fermilab experiment E835 [1]. The tracker is being used for a high resolution measurement of the polar angle /spl theta/ and to provide a first level trigger, exploiting the fast response and very good time resolution of the signal from the fibers. The small amount of light from the fibers is detected by solid state devices (VLPC: Visible Light Photon Counters), with very high quantum efficiency. This paper reports about the construction of the tracker and gives the first results on the detector performance: light yield/mip, efficiency, signal homogeneity and time resolution.