Measurement of the trailing edge of cosmic-ray track signals from a round-tube drift chamber

The trailing edge of tube drift-chamber signals for charged particles is ex pected to provide information concerning the particle passage time. This in formation may be useful for separating meaningful signals from overlapping garbage at high-rate experiments, such as the future LHC experiments. We ca rried out a cosmic-ray test using a small tube chamber in order to investig ate the feasibility of this idea. We achieved a trailing-edge time resoluti on of 12 ns in RMS by applying simple pulse shaping to eliminate a signal t ail. A comparison with a Monte Carlo simulation indicates the importance of well-optimized signal shaping to achieve good resolution. The resolution m ay be further improved with better shaping. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.