A small angle elastic scattering detector for the LHC and/or SSC

Abstract We propose a multitube drift chamber for a small angle elastic scattering measurement at the LHC and/or the SSC collider. The stainless steel thin-walled multitubes serve as mini-drift chambers which can be inserted directly into the beam pipe. The diameter of the tubes, and hence the maximum drift time, is matched to the bunch repetition rate to avoid mixing of events from different bunch crossings. The resulting high segmentation (32/unit) will allow easy treatment of multi-event bunch crossings. The proposed detector is self-calibrating and self-triggering. We expect a resolution better than 100 μm in drift and 300 μm in charge division per tube and the high radiation resistance of the device will allow us to measure the scattering at angles as low as 10 −6 rad where the Coulomb scattering dominates.