Construction and analysis of a prototype z drift chamber for the H1 experiment

We discuss the construction and analysis of a novel wire arrangement, prototype z drift chamber for the H1 experiment at HERA (DESY). The final chamber will consist of fifteen 12 cm long rings along the z axis, each of which is a regular sixteenfold polygon in cross section. There are four sense wires and three guard wires per ring, and these wires lie in a plane tilted 45° from the normal. The final chamber needs to be able to measure accurate z information for polar angles, θ, between 20° and 170°. Using the tilted wire arrangement, and a sophisticated drift time to position conversion, we have achieved a resolution of about 320 μm which is virtually independent of the crossing angle