MIRACLE — a CCD based image analysing system for the research with nuclear track emulsion chambers

To search for the quark gluon plasma one possibility is the investigation of secondary tracks produced in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions. Using nuclear emulsions as detector these secondaries are to be detected and reconstructed with the help of an ordinary microscope. With increasing energies and projectile/target masses the number of produced particles rises up to ≈ 2000 at the new Pb beam at the CERN SPS. Manual evaluation of the emulsions will be impossible for these collisions. Therefore we are developing an automatic system (MIRACLE) which is different to other systems. It is based on conventional cheap image processing hardware (b/w CCD camera, SCSI Framegrabber). The software uses image processing algorithms.