A high-precision drift straw tube counter for particle tracking for accelerator and space experiments

We have designed and tested a straw tube detector prototype to investigate the possibility to operate a full-size device in sealed mode with extremely reduced gas leaks in accelerator experiments and astroparticle physics researches in outer space. In order to acheive a high spatial resolution we tested a “cool”-gas-based mixture, namely, argon–carbon dioxide at atmospheric pressure. In our tests, running the straw tube counter in drift mode with properly designed front-end electronics, we obtained a single-tube spatial resolution of the order of 30 μm.