Primary Ionization and Particle Identification with Straw Tube Detectors

TL;DR

This paper investigates primary ionization and particle identification capabilities of straw tube detectors, optimizing gas mixtures and simulating particle responses, with additional analysis of gamma peaks from $^{60}$CO decay relevant to medical applications.

Contribution

It provides new insights into optimal xenon-based gas mixtures for maximum transition radiation and primary ionization, enhancing particle identification in straw tube detectors.

Findings

Xenon:He:CH₄ (30:55:15) yields maximum transition radiation.

Xenon:CO₂ (70:30) shows maximum primary ionization.

Simulations demonstrate effective particle discrimination among muons, pions, and kaons.

Abstract

The charged particles are tracked in the high energy physics detectors to provide the information of their properties. One of the tracking detector is straw tube detector that has been used by many experiments. The motivation behind the current work is to study the primary ionization and particle identification using straw tube detectors. Additionally, we report the decay of $^{60}$CO for the study of gamma peaks since these are used in cobalt therapy, that is beneficial for cancer/tumor treatment. The various studies like primary ionization, spatial co-ordinate distributions in the different gas mixtures, transition radiation, drift velocities of electrons and diffusion coefficients using different xenon-based gas mixtures have been obtained. These studies have been done after the optimization of xenon-based gas mixtures for a deeper understanding. The gas mixture that shows maximum transition radiation among the xenon-based gas mixtures was found to be $Xe:He:CH_{4}$ :: 30:55:15. The gas mixture that posses maximum primary ionization has been observed to be $Xe:CO_{2}$ :: 70:30. Finally, the simulations have been carried out for the particle identification in the straw tube detectors with different particles i.e., muons, pions and kaons.