Proportional chambers for the barrel hadron calorimeter of the L3 experiment

Abstract The design and the mass production of the proportional wire chambers for the barrel part of the uranium-gas sampling hadron calorimeter of the L3 detector at the CERN Large Electron-Positron storage ring (LEP) are described. The chambers meet the specific requirements arising from the limited space available to the calorimeter, the radioactivity of uranium, and the physics criteria of good energy and position resolution for incident hadrons. The mass production techniques employed ensured that all of the 371664 chamber cells have uniform response (with 5% accuracy) to ionizing particles. Over 8000 chambers of the same design, in 53 different sizes, were manufactured and tested at the ITEP (Moscow), at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and at the IHEP (Beijing).