A frameless, cylindrically shaped, multiwire proportional chamber using charge division readout

PWCs have been constructed in the shape of cylindrical quandrants, placed them around the bicone in an experiment at the CERN ISR, and operated them in a charge division mode to obtain two dimensional position information. A pair of PWCs share a cylindrical styrofoam shell as the basic support member, and contain approximately 0.008 radiation lengths of material. The observed charge division resolution is delta x/L approximately 0.5% in reasonable agreement with an expected resolution of approximately 0.3% due primarily to digitization noise. Reduction of digitization noise is limited by available dynamic range of the electronics and the width of the pulse height distributions. A method is described, using X-rays from /sup 55 /Fe strip sources for calibrating the electronics, which is sufficiently accurate to match the observed resolution. (13 refs).