Studies of Helium Based Gas Mixtures Using a Small Cell Drift Chamber

An international collaboration is currently working on the construction and design of an asymmetric B Factory at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center that will be ready to collect data in 1999. The main physics motivation for such a facility is to test the description and mechanism of CP violation in the Standard Model of particle physics and provide insight into the question of why more matter than antimatter is observed in the universe today. In particular, this experiment will measure CP violation in the decay of B mesons. In the early stages of this effort, the Canadian contingent proposed to build the central tracking chamber for the BaBar detector. Presently, a prototype drift chamber is in operation and studies are being performed to test some of the unique features of drift chamber design dictated by the conditions of the experiment. Using cosmic muons, it is possible to study tracking and pattern recognition in the prototype chamber, and therefore calculate the efficiency and spatial resolution of the prototype chamber cells. These performance features will be used to test whether or not the helium-based gas mixtures proposed for the BaBar drift chamber are a viable alternative to the more traditional argon-based gases