A new scintillator tile/fiber preshower detector for the CDF central calorimeter

A detector designed to measure early particle showers has been installed in front of the central Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) calorimeter at the Tevatron. This new preshower detector is based on scintillator tiles coupled to wavelength-shifting fibers read out by multianode photomultipliers and has a total of 3072 read-out channels. The replacement of the old gas detector was required due to an expected increase in instantaneous luminosity of the Tevatron collider in the next few years. Calorimeter coverage, jet energy resolution, and electron and photon identification are among the expected improvements. The final detector design, together with the R&D studies that led to the choice of scintillator and fiber, mechanical assembly, and quality control are presented. The detector was installed in the fall 2004 Tevatron shutdown and started collecting colliding beam data by the end of the same year. First measurements indicate a light yield of 12 photoelectrons/MIP, a more than two-fold increase over the design goals.