Use
The development of the chamber enabled scientists to study the trajectories of particles with much improved precision, in addition to which, to also for the first time observe and study the rarer interactions that occur through particle interaction. The Mw chamber is an advancement of the proportional chamber that has the capacities to measure the energies of particles instead of just the measurement of number of particles as in previous detection by counters, for example the Geiger counter. This is achieved by a change to the sensory apparatus of the instrument in that instead of one anode wire surrounded by a cathode plate, a number of equidistant wires provide sensory information from within two parallel plates..
For high energy physics experiments, it is also valuable to observe the particle's path. For a long time, bubble chambers were used for this purpose, but with the improvement of electronics, it became desirable to have a detector with fast electronic read-out. (In bubble chambers, photographs were made, printed and then looked through.) A wire chamber is a chamber with many parallel wires, arranged as a grid and put on high voltage, with the metal casing being on ground potential. As in the Geiger counter, a particle leaves a trace of ions and electrons, which drift toward the case or the nearest wire, respectively. By marking off the wires which had a pulse of current, one can see the particle's path.
The chamber has a very good relative time resolution, good positional accuracy, and a self-triggered operation (Ferbel 1977).
Read more about this topic: Wire Chamber
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