The Outer Tracker Detector of the HERA-B Experiment Part I: Detector

Abstract

The HERA-B Outer Tracker is a large system of planar drift chambers with about 113000 read-out channels. Its inner part has been designed to be exposed to a particle flux of up to 2.10^5 cm^-2 s^-1, thus coping with conditions similar to those expected for future hadron collider experiments. 13 superlayers, each consisting of two individual chambers, have been assembled and installed in the experiment. The stereo layers inside each chamber are composed of honeycomb drift tube modules with 5 and 10 mm diameter cells. Chamber aging is prevented by coating the cathode foils with thin layers of copper and gold, together with a proper drift gas choice. Longitudinal wire segmentation is used to limit the occupancy in the most irradiated detector regions to about 20 %. The production of 978 modules was distributed among six different laboratories and took 15 months. For all materials in the fiducial region of the detector good compromises of stability versus thickness were found. A closed-loop gas system supplies the Ar/CF4/CO2 gas mixture to all chambers. The successful operation of the HERA-B Outer Tracker shows that a large tracker can be efficiently built and safely operated under huge radiation load at a hadron collider.

28 pages, 14 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Studies of aging and HV break down problems during development and operation of MSGC and GEM detectors for the Inner Tracking System of HERA-B
• Aging Studies for the Large Honeycomb Drift Tube System of the Outer Tracker of HERA-B
• The Outer Tracker Detector of the HERA-B Experiment. Part II: Front-End Electronics

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• K*0 and phi Meson Production in Proton-Nucleus Interactions at sqrt(s) = 41.6 GeV
• Measurement of the J/Psi Production Cross Section in 920 GeV/c Fixed-Target Proton-Nucleus Interactions
• The Outer Tracker Detector of the HERA-B Experiment. Part II: Front-End Electronics
• Calibration of the mirror system in the HERA-B RICH
• Bottom production cross section from double muonic decays of b-hadrons in 920 GeV proton-nucleus collision
• Luminosity determination at HERA-B
• V^0 production in p+A collisions at \sqrt{s} = 41.6 GeV
• Study of the Jet Shape at 920 GeV/c in Proton-Nucleus Intereactions with HERA-B Detector