This paper describes the design, fabrication and testing of the
Anti-Coincidence Detector (ACD) for the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope
(GLAST) Large Area Telescope (LAT). The ACD is LAT first-level defense against
the charged cosmic ray background that outnumbers the gamma rays by 3-5 orders
of magnitude. The ACD covers the top and 4 sides of the LAT tracking detector,
requiring a total active area of ~8.3 square meters. The ACD detector utilizes
plastic scintillator tiles with wave-length shifting fiber readout. In order to
suppress self-veto by shower particles at high gamma-ray energies, the ACD is
segmented into 89 tiles of different sizes. The overall ACD efficiency for
detection of singly charged relativistic particles entering the tracking
detector from the top or sides of the LAT exceeds the required 0.9997.Comment: 33 pages, 19 figure
