Description
A proportional counter uses a wire, under high voltage, which runs through a metal or conductive enclosure whose walls are held at ground potential. The enclosure is filled with carefully chosen gas, such as an argon/methane mix, such that any ionizing particle that passes through the tube will ionize surrounding gaseous atoms. The resulting ions and electrons are accelerated by the electric field around the wire, causing a localised cascade of ionization which is collected on the wire and results in an electric current proportional to the energy of the detected particle. This allows the experimenter to count particles and importantly, in the case of the proportional counter, to determine their energy.
Adaptions of design are the thin gap, resistive plate and drift chambers. The drift chamber is also sub-divided into ranges of specific use in the chamber designs known as time projection, microstrip gas, and those types of detectors that use silicon.
Read more about this topic: Wire Chamber
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to- morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible of civilisation. I suspect it is in their kitchens and not in their churches that their reformation must be worked, and that Missionaries of that description from [France] would avail more than those who should endeavor to tame them by precepts of religion or philosophy.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)