The primary goals of the PHENIX experiment are to detect a new phase of matter, called Quark Gluon Plasma and to measure its properties by means of relativistic heavy ion collisions at BNL-RHIC. For this purpose, PHENIX is to study leptonic, photonic and hadronic signatures. (see also BNL-RHIC and PHENIX home pages.)
The PHENIX time-of-flight (TOF) counter serves as a particle identification device for hadrons. The TOF system, located 5.0 m away from the vertex, consists of 1000 elements of plastic scintillation counters with photomultiplier tube readouts. The time resolution of the TOF system is designed to be less than 80 ps, which corresponds to the pion and kaon separation up to 2.4 GeV/c in the experiment. The highly segmented high resolution TOF system has been developed and being constructed at Tsukuba.
PHENIX TOF system will be used at CERN-WA98 experiment till RHIC starts.