A Spherical Drift Chamber Area Detector for X-Ray Crystallography

A multiwire proportional chamber system has been built as an area detector for use in x-ray crystallography with Cu K¿ radiation (1.54Å). The chamber, constructed by Charpak and collaborators at CERN, consists of a 10cm thick spherical interaction region with a radial electric field, a transition from spherical to plane geometry and a 50cm × 50cm multiwire proportional chamber and subtends a 90° opening angle. Two dimensional position information is obtained from orthogonal cathode planes using a high speed analog centroid finding technique. Data on spatial and energy resolution as a function of angle and depth of interaction in the spherical drift region using a collimated, pulsed, x-ray source are presented. Ionization loss as a function of drift distance and field and loss due to field shaping grids has also been measured.