Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 419 (1998) 726730

GARFIELD, recent developments

Rob Veenhof
NIKHEF, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Abstract Various developments have taken place in GARFIELD over the last 2 years: the limitation to analytic potentials and 2-dimensional geometries is being lifted via interfaces with nite element programs such as [1]; detailed calculations of the electrostatic wire movements have been added; cluster generation has been enhanced considerably thanks to an interface with the Heed program [2] and considerable eort has been put into the improvement of signal calculations. I will illustrate these points with calculations carried out by the researchers for whom these extensions were made. 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Finite element calculations GARFIELD traditionally diers from most other chamber simulation programs by its use of analytic potentials rather than potentials computed with nite element methods. This approach limits the applicability of the program to simple, 2-dimensional structures since virtually no analytic solutions are known for even simple 3-dimensional congurations. A possible reason for this situation is that 2-dimensional elds are conveniently solved with the help of complex algebra, while there is no equivalent structure for 3-dimensional space. More specically, 1 has a eld structure with (",#,;), while this does not work for 1. Dielectric media can to some extent be dealt with by introducing series of mirror charges, but this is cumbersome.

Still, this limitation was a deliberate choice: analytic potentials are very fast to compute, and if applicable, their accuracy easily exceeds the accuracy of nite element methods with limited precautions. Moreover, many chambers can very well be approximated with this approach, as for instance illustrated in Section 2. Since there is a large commercial market for nite element programs, the most reasonable approach for simulating gas detectors seems to be in creating interfaces (Fig. 1). GARFIELD currently has an interface to read the eld maps, both two and three dimensional, produced by Maxwell [1]. Similar interfaces for other programs are likely to follow, I hope in particular to provide a direct interface, i.e. not passing via les, with programs like Dipack.

2. Wire movements Pawel Majewski [3]

 Present address: CERN EP Division, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland. E-mail: Rob.Veenhof@cern.ch.

Traditionally, several simplifying assumptions are made when computing wire movements: the

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Fig. 1. Illustration of the interface with the nite element program Maxwell, applied to a GEM-like foil. GEMs have a denser packing of the holes (left) and a Micromegas grid (right).

electrostatic force acting on the wire does not change when the wire moves, or varies linearly with the displacement in case of an initial (labile) equilibrium; the wire shape is parabolic; only one wire moves. The Alice experiment, proposed to be operated at the CERN LHC collider, contains a RICH (HMPID) for identication of high momentum particles. This device is read out with an MWPC of which one cathode plane consists of a pad array coated with a photo-sensitive material (e.g. CsI) in which the Cherenkov photons liberate photo-electrons. The other cathode, 4 mm from the pad array, has to be transparent to let the photons through, and is made of wires with a 1 mm pitch. The anodes are strung in parallel with the cathode wires, are located halfway between the cathodes and have a 2 mm pitch. All wires were originally meant to be 136 cm long. Because of the dierent nature of the two cathodes, the eld is not symmetric around the initial anode wire position. Moreover the small spacing of the wires compared to their lengths, is likely to cause large wire movements, and also the cathode wires will probably move. As a result, the approximations listed above are not applicable.

We have therefore done a calculation of the wire ovements in which the force acting on each point of the wire is computed as function of the local shift of all wires. Also, no a priori assumptions were made on the wire shape. The dierential equations that govern the wire shape were solved numerically, using a multiple shooting technique based on Runge-Kutta-Nystrom integration steps. The interest in the multiple shooting technique is that this method can cope with extended areas where the wire is hardly bent, single shot techniques would fail there for lack of accuracy. RungeKutta-Nystrom integration, a 5 order technique, is well adapted to second order partial dierential equations. To investigate whether the construction is realistic, optical measurements on a prototype have been performed, and these have been compared with the above calculation. The results of this comparison are shown in Fig. 2. Fig. 3 shows the comparison of the detailed calculation with a constant and linear force models. Although the linear model is in high agreement for low voltages, both fail to predict the breakdown voltage correctly. Clearly visible

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Fig. 2. Shift of the anode wires (left) and of the cathode wires (right) as function of the voltage applied to the anode wires.

Fig. 3. The gure on the left illustrates how the main force component varies with the local wire shift. The right gure compares the detailed calculation (solid line) with a model in which the force is assumed constant (dashed line) and a model with a linear dependence of the force on the sag (dotted line).

in the calculations is the presence of a series of instabilities. In the classic calculations, these are point-like. This is not the case here because these

points typically correspond to situations where the wires touch each other or the pad plane-in which case there is genuinely no solution.

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3. Resolution of the drift tubes of the Atlas muon detector Werner Riegler [4] The current Atlas muon detector design foresees approximately half a million tubes of 3 cm diameter with a wire running down the center of the tube. The tubes are lled with an Argon based gas mixture, under a pressure of 3 atm. The muon detector is inserted in a toroidal magnet with an average eld strength around 6000 G, oriented predominantly parallel with the tubes. The design positional accuracy per hit is around 6080 m. In order to achieve this ambitious goal, the position of the chambers in space is to be monitored with a laser alignment system to 30 m, while the wires within one chamber are, by construction, to be positioned with respect to the alignment system to 20 m and with respect to the tube to some 10 m. The latter two points are veried for a subset of the chambers by X-ray tomography [5] at the 510 m level. The magnetic eld should be known to a few tens of G. This leaves little margin for the intrinsic detector resolution, hence the gas mixture and the electronics had to be optimised with great care. Critical factors with the gas optimisation were nding a gas that is suciently fast to keep the occupancy and hence pileup low. At the same time, low diusion is preferred to enhance resolution. Gases with a small Lorentz angle have the advantage of being less sensitive to uncertainties in the magnetic eld although the latter is not likely to be a problem. The r(t) relation should be fairly linear so as to avoid local accumulations of space charge. Organic gases are to be avoided as much as possible because the risk of ageing they present. With the exception of the ageing aspect, the optimisation of the gas mixture has been performed making extensive use of the Magboltz programme [6]. The considerations can probably not all be satised at the same time, and the choice of gas mixture is not nalised yet. The optimisation of the electronics parameters has been done focussing on optimal single track resolution, taking the ability to identify tracks against a photon and neutron induced background as a bonus. Key ingredients in this study were an accurate description of the ionisation pattern of

charged particles and the simulation of the signal shape. Ionisation was simulated using the Heed program [2]. This program simulates the ionisation process as a knock-out of a electron (which always has a range, not necessarily the large range of what are conventionally called electrons) and the return of the excited atom by emission of Auger electrons or uorescence photons. The secondary electrons and photons can be re-absorbed and cause further ionisation electrons to be produced. The signal shape was originally assumed to be due to the ion component, which would give a simple 1/t shape. However, for E'15 kV/cm, which is reached at r"500 m in the MDT tubes, the mobility of Ar> ions starts to fall like 1/(E, causing the rst part of the ion tail to be less steep. Next, avalanches typically start at a distance of order 100 m from the wire and have a centre of gravity at a few m from the wire. The result is twofold: rst the electrons themselves induce a very fast signal of which the importance rises rapidly with the radial distance of the avalanche centre of gravity. Secondly, a small ion signal is already induced ahead of the nominal arrival time of the electron that starts the avalanche, while the ion signal after the nominal arrival time is signicantly reduced up to a time of approximately 50 nsec. Including these eects led to an improved description of the signal shape, in particular of the ion component in muon data. However, in Fe data, the electron contribution to the signal in the calculations seems larger than in the data. This can be due to a variety of reasons. Given the uncertainty of the Townsend coecients, it is well possible to make an error of several m in the centre of gravity: in the case of the Atlas MDTs, the ratio of electron to ion current varies by a factor of 4 if the centre of gravity of the avalanche is shifted by 510 m. The electron induced signal can also be reduced because the electrons are located between a positively charged wire and a positively charged ion cloud. The net eld they experience is therefore reduced. Further explanations can be sought in an imperfect understanding of the transmission of psec signals through the tube and the electronics. Clearly, this topic needs more investigation.

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For this type of detector, the ionisation process, and in particular the presence of very large clusters ( electrons) turn out to be the main contribution to the resolution. That Heed does an excellent job simulating these processes is shown by the comparison of the resolution calculated using Heed with the measured resolution, see Fig. 4. For reference, also a calculation based on a cluster size distribution measured up to size 20, then extrapolated as 1/n to size 500, without spatial extent of electrons, is shown.

References
Fig. 4. Resolution in Ar 91%, N 4%,CH 5% at 3 atm, com  puted using a measured cluster size distribution and using Heed, compared with data. [1] Ansoft, Maxwell Parameter extractor 3D. [2] I. Smirnov, Heed, Version 1.01 (1996). [3] P. Majewski, Multiwire Proportional Chamber for the fast RICH detector for the ALICE experiment at the LHC, MSc thesis, Universytet Warszawski (1996). [4] W. Riegler, Limits to Drift chamber resolution, PhD thesis, Technische Universitat Wien (1997). [5] E. Gschwendtner, Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A, 419 (1998) 342. [6] S. Biagi, Magboltz (1997). [7] PSPICE, version 6.2 (1995).

The signals that came out of the simulation have been further processed with the Spice [7] program and then analysed like data.