The AGILE anticoincidence detector

AGILE is a γ-ray astrophysics space mission which will operate, starting from 2006, in the 30 MeV–50 GeV energy range with imaging capability also in the 15–45 keV energy band. In order to achieve the required detection sensitivity, all AGILE detectors are surrounded by an anticoincidence detector aimed at charged particle background rejection with an inefficiency as low as 10−4. In this work, the design and the structure of this anticoincidence detector are presented, as well as its performances in terms of charged particles detection inefficiency as derived from extensive calibrations performed at CERN PS.