Monte-Carlo studies of the performance of scintillator detectors for time-of-flight measurements

In this paper we report on a Monte-Carlo program, SToF, developed to evaluate the performance of scintillator-based Time-of-Flight (TOF) detectors. This program has been used in the design of the TOF system for the PHENIX experiment at RHIC. The program was used to evaluate the intrinsic time-of-flight resolution of various scintillator and light-guide geometries, and the results of these simulations are presented here. The simulation results agree extremely well with measured pulse-height and time distributions with one adjustable parameter. These results, thus, explain also the reduced quantities, such as the position dependence of the time resolution, etc, implying that SToF will be generally useful for estimating the performance of TOF detectors.