This document presents the technical layout and the performance of the CLAS12 Forward Tagger (FT). The FT, composed of an electromagnetic calorimeter based on PbWO 4 crystals (FT-Cal), a scintillation hodoscope (FT-Hodo), and several layers of Micromegas trackers (FT-Trk), has been designed to detect electrons and photons scattered at polar angles from 2 • to 5 • and to meet the physics goals of the hadron spectroscopy program and other experiments running with the CLAS12 spectrometer in Hall B.

The Micromegas Vertex Tracker was designed to improve upon the tracking capabilities of the baseline design of the CLAS12 spectrometer in Hall B at Jefferson Laboratory. A Barrel Micromegas Tracker made with six concentric cylinders, each made of three 120 • -sector tiles, surrounds the Silicon Vertex Tracker, and a Forward Micromegas Tracker composed of 6 disks is placed 30 cm downstream of the liquid-hydrogen target. Both trackers sit in a 5 T solenoid magnetic field. All Micromegas elements are based on resistive technology to withstand luminosities up to 10 35 cm −2 s −1 , as well as on bulk technology to enforce gain uniformity and mechanical robustness. Due to the high magnetic field, dedicated electronics have been designed and displaced ∼2 m away from the detectors. The electronics readout is based on the DREAM ASICs that allow sustained operation up to 20 kHz trigger rate at the maximum luminosity.

Optical systems designed for some defense, environmental, and commercial remote-sensing applications must simultaneously have a high dynamic range, high sensitivity, and low noise-equivalent contrast. We have adapted James Janesick's photon transfer technique for characterizing the noise performance of an electron multiplication CCD (EMCCD), and we have developed methods for characterizing performance parameters in a lab environment. We have defined a new figure of merit to complement the traditionally used dynamic range that quantifies the usefulness of EMCCD imagers. We use the results for EMCCDs to predict their performance with hyperspectral and multispectral imaging systems.