Re. Robson et al., ELECTRON-TRANSPORT THEORY IN GASES - MUST IT BE SO DIFFICULT, Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment, 394(1-2), 1997, pp. 74-86
This article reviews recent progress in both experimental and kinetic
theoretical determination of charged particle transport coefficients i
n electric and magnetic fields in the context of wire gas chamber dete
ctors. The ''Magboltz'' code of Biagi [13] is discussed. It is pointed
out that there is really no alternative to the accurate ''multiterm t
heory'' of Ness [3-5] if high precision is required, but this may not
be readily accessible to the nonspecialist because of its mathematical
complexity. On the other hand, ''momentum transfer'' theory provides
relatively simple expressions for transport coefficients and has an ac
curacy of the order of 10%. We focus on this simplified theory in the
bulk of the paper, discussing some previous results and giving new for
mulas. In order to illustrate the utility of the method, we have perfo
rmed numerical calculations in several cases of relevance to wire gas
chambers.