The TRIUMF radiative muon capture facility

Abstract Radiative muon capture (RMC) on hydrogen produces photons with a yield of ∼10 −8 per stopped muon. To measure RMC at TRIUMF we have constructed a large-solid-angle photon pair-spectrometer which surrounds the liquid hydrogen target. The spectrometer consists of a cylindrical photon converter and a large-volume cylindrical drift chamber to track the e + e − pairs. It is enclosed in a spectrometer magnet which produces a highly uniform axial magnetic field. The detector subsystems, the hardware trigger and the data acquisition system are described, chamber calibration and tracking techniques are presented, and the spectrometer performance and its Monte Carlo simulation are discussed.