Straw tracker

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2007)

A straw tracker is a type of Particle detector which uses many straw chambers to track the path of a particle. The path is determined by the best fit to all the straws with hits. Since the time for a particular straw to produce a signal is proportional to the distance of the particle's closest approach to that chamber's wire, if a particle on a predictable path (e.g. a helix in a magnetic field) passes through many straws, the path of the particle can be determined more precisely than the size of any particular straw.