A straw chambers' tracker for the high rate experiment 835 at the Fermilab accumulator

Two layers of proportional drift tubes (aluminum mylar straws) are staggered in two cylindrical light chambers to measure charged particles' azimuthal angle. To stand the high rates (similar to 10 kHz/cm(2)) and minimize the pile-up of the high luminosity experiment 835 at FNAL, a fast ASIC Amplifier-Shaper-Discriminator (ASD-8B) was chosen. The front-end electronics, designed exclusively with SMD components, was mounted on the downstream end plug of each chamber to avoid oscillations and noise. Design, construction and operational performances of these detectors are presented. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.