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The main sources of background for the operation of the GLAST-Large Area Telescope are primary protons, albedo gammas from the earth and photons coming from interaction of positron and protons in the micro-meteoride-shield (MMS) surrounding the LAT, which create photon pairs through annihilation and pi0 decay.
An extensive beam test campaign was performed in summer 2006 on the LAT Calibration Unit (CU), a detector built with flight spare parts of the LAT; the goal of the program was to support the LAT Instrument Calibration by providing direct measurements of the physical processes taking place in the CU detector when exposed to different beams, by comparing the obtained measurements with Monte Carlo predictions and by eventually validating the full LAT MC code used to provide instrument calibrations and background rejection strategies.
The study of the signal produced in the CU by sources of the LAT background was performed with photon beams shot from the side of the CU, proton beams and positrons beams reaching the CU after crossing an MMS target.
Results from analysis of these data are presented in this talk.

Measuring the PSF and the energy resolution with the GLAST-LAT Calibration Unit

DRAFT Speaker TBD on behalf of the Beam Test Team (poster)

Because of the large phase space of the LAT and its complex structure, an advanced MonteCarlo simulation of the LAT, based on the Geant4 package, is used to optimize the instrument response functions and the background rejection. Testing the instrument with real beams at accelerator facilities was needed to make sure that this simulation is able to reproduce real data.
Between July and September 2006, we have tested the LAT Calibration Unit (CU) at CERN, both at PS and SPS accelerators. The CU is a detector built with two complete flight spare modules, a third spare calorimeter module, five anticoincidence tiles located around the telescope and flight-like readout electronics. The CU was exposed to gamma beams (from ~50 MeV up to 2.5 GeV) and electron beams (from 2 GeV up to 280 GeV) in many configurations (various incoming angles and impact points) in order to cover the large phase space of the LAT.
This large amount of data will allow us to determine the performances of the LAT, such as PSF and energy resolution. This poster will present the preliminary results on these topics.