Recent results on a simple scheme for 2D localization of particles in a wire chamber

A simple scheme for 2D localization of ionizing particles in a multiwire proportional chamber has been proposed, in which a multilayer printed circuit board replaces the usual X and Y cathode wire planes involved in the position encoding. Results are shown that illustrate performance improvements: differential non-linearity <10%, integral non-linearity <0.1% and spatial resolution <1 mm in both directions. Also presented are two image acquisition interfaces for PCs. One of these makes use of the PCʹs Pentium processor to histogram data in the computer memory, reaching counting rates up to 3×105 events per second. In the other one, a logic machine is used instead of a dedicated processor, allowing histogramming rates up to 106 events per second into an on-board 1 Mword memory.