On March 28th, 2008, the BTF (Beijing Test Beam Facility) concluded its last running season of 437hrs and will soon enter into its upgrade phase. During the last running season six users had carried out their experiments on BTF and three main detector beam tests had been accomplished.

1. HXMT – LE Background Particle Beam Test ( Particle Astrophysics Centre) Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope ( HXMT）is an all-sky hard X-ray survey equipment. One of the main components with HXMT is the Low Energy X-ray Telescope (LE). The aim of the LE beam test was to study the background effects of high energy particles in cosmic rays. The test measured the LE energy and time responses with high energy particles (electron,pion and proton), whose momentum scope was from 300MeV to 1.1Gev.

2. MRPC-Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chamber (Department of Engineering Physics, Tsinghua University)Multi-gap resistive plate chamber (MRPC) proved to have good time resolution (less than 100 ps) and high detection efficiency (higher than 95%), which has been applied to construct a full barrel time-of-flight (TOF) detector for the STAR experiment at RHIC. The new MRPC (50KHz/cm2) prototype with a high counting rate was successfully tested on BTF.

3.CVD Diamond Film Detector (Northwest Institute of Nuclear Technology)The diamond detector is characteristic of radiation-resistance and fast time response, which will be applied on BEPCII and BESIII to measure the irradiated flux and dose rate. The performance test of the detector module was successfully carried out on BTF.

Following the approval of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and that of the Institute of High Energy Physics, preparations for the BTF upgrade are now fully under way and it will experience a long shutdown during the period of 2008-2009. The main upgrade tasks include: improving beam optics and beam measurement with new BPMs, improving alignment scheme (by utilizing laser based techniques), shortening the current spectrometer and adding TPC+GEM’s detector for double particle identification, rebuilding particle tracking detectors, adding instrument sproviding real-time measurements for material radiation damage and radiation biology.

Efforts by all involved in the above tests and experiment are highly appreciated.