Dean Karlen
University of Victoria


Development of a Time Projection Chamber with Gas Electron Multiplier Readout
(D. Karlen, R. Carnegie, M. Dixit, H. Mes, K. Sachs)

In the initial North American and European Linear Collider experimental 
designs, the leading candidate for the central tracker is a Time Projection 
Chamber (TPC). A research and development program is underway in Canada to 
improve the performance of TPCs for this purpose by using Gas Electron 
Multipliers (GEMs) for reading out the drifting electrons at the endplates 
of the detector. By replacing the conventional wire-grid amplification stage 
with GEMs, the E x B effect, which limits the spatial resolution of a 
conventional TPC, should be eliminated.