The Electron Muon Ranger for the MICE Experiment

The physics of neutrino covers a fundamental role in modern physics and, in particular, it represents the first experimental evidence for new physics beyond the Standard Model. Since 1930, neutrino physics has required a worldwide effort both in the development of new techniques and in the construction of dedicated detectors to investigate and study the nature of such a new particle. However, it still remains an open field. This motivates a worldwide effort aimed at the development of new facilities (Neutrino Factory) and experimental techniques (ionization cooling) to produce a larger number of well-known neutrinos from muon decay (simplifying the detector system): MICE works in this direction and its main goals are the demonstration of the ionization cooling technique and the measurement of a dedicated cooling channel performances. This thesis work deals with the construction, characterization and commissioning of the Electron Muon Ranger, a tracker-calorimeter placed at the end of the MICE cooling channel and able to distinguish electrons and muons. The detector is based on scintillating triangular shape bars, arranged in 48 x-y layers, for a total of more than 1 ton of plastic scintillator; the electronics chain is based on a dedicated FrontEnd Board (FEB) and standard VME boards. The thesis provides a complete description of the final detectors and of the prototypes manufactured to study both the mechanical and electrical aspects. The results obtained during dedicated test phases of the prototypes and the commissioning of the first layers of the final detector are presented in detail.