Experimental studies of the firefly chamber

Abstract A new technique to collect the light emitted through the electron avalanche process in a thin gap wire chamber is presented: The light is captured by wavelength shifting fibres and recorded by a photosensitive device outside of the chamber. Efficiency measurements with pure CF 4 were done with sources and muouns. The main advantages of the proposed method are the possibility of tuning the light yield for shower detection in a sampling calorimeter with fine granularity, to get fast signals, and to have only passive elements at the front end.