The forward drift chamber system for the GlueX detector

The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF) is planning an upgrade of the existing electron beam energy from 6 GeV to 12 GeV. The program calls for the construction of a new experimental hall - Hall D - and a new Tagger hall in which the electron beam will be converted to a photon beam that interacts with a target at the center of the GlueX detector housed in Hall D. The detector is based on a solenoidal design with drift chambers and a lead-scintillator calorimeter inside the bore of the magnet and sets of time- of-flight scintillators and lead-glass crystals in the downstream direction outside of the magnet. The Forward Drift Chambers will measure the paths of charged particles travelling in the forward direction downstream of the target. Each chamber unit will consist of a wire plane flanked on either side by cathode planes divided into strips. The combination of wire and cathode readout allows for reconstruction of "space points" at several positions along the beam line. A small-scale prototype of one unit has been constructed and studied with cosmic rays. The best resolution obtained on the bench for the coordinate along the wire is 158plusmn3 mum averaged over multiple anode wires, meeting our design goal of <200 mum.