A study of the timing characteristics of scintillator counters with fine-mesh photomultiplier tubes

We report on a study of the precision of Time-Of-Flight measurements using plastic scintillator counters with Fine Mesh Photomultiplier Tubes (FM PMT). This work was part of an investigation of several techniques considered for hadron identification in the B factory detector (BaBar) at SLAC. In cosmic ray tests of prototype counters we achieved a time resolution of 91 ps with a 3.0 m long counter and 70 ps with a 1.0 m long counter.