Methods for studying close-track efficiency

Wire chambers used for particle tracking suffer a loss of efficiency when the trajectories of two particles from the same event are very close together in space. We describe two new methods for the study of this close-track efficiency. One is based on the study of a correlation function for particles with different masses as a function of their relative momenta in the laboratory reference system. The other method is based on the analysis of artificial events, constructed by merging raw data from separate events. Both methods and the standard Monte Carlo method were applied to data from the CLAS detector at Jefferson Laboratory. All three methods provide the same result for close-track efficiency with an accuracy sufficient for practical application.