The electrostatic field in microstrip chambers and its influence on detector performance

Abstract This paper describes the results of detailed field calculations for microstrip gas chambers. A program was written using the multigrid technique, which allows to do very fast electrical field calculations for two-dimensional geometries. Typical execution times for a problem on a grid with 154 000 nodes are 125 s on a SUN IPC and 14 s on the CERN IBM 3090. The speed of this program makes it practical to do field calculations for a variety of geometries, materials and operating conditions. This has allowed us to gain a better understanding of important phenomena for the operation of gas microstrip chambers, such as charging of the dielectric support.