The Multiwire Proportional Chambers of the KASCADE Central Detector

The Central Detector of KASCADE:

The Central Detector of the KASCADE experiment consists of a hadron calorimeter of 20m x 16m (3800 t iron absorber) and a thickness of 11 nuclear interaction lengths. The third layer of the sampling calorimeter, is equipped with a trigger and fast timing facility (red) which enables measurements of the arrival time distributions of muons. For muon identification, the trigger detectors operate in coincidence with the multiwire proportional chambers MWPC (blue) below the hadron calorimeter.

(The z-axis in the picture is stretched by a factor 2).

The Multiwire Proportional Chambers (MWPC):

This facility is built up by 32 chambers (turquoise), 16 stacks with two chambers each, covering 41 % of the total central detector area and more than 60 % in an inner ring of radius 8 m .


Schematic view of one MWPC:

Every chamber contains of three layers of wires and stripes in a 18mm gas volume:


The crossed layers allows to estimate the crossing points of penetrating particles in high accuracy:


First Measurements with the MWPCs:

  myon lateral distributions

  particle densities

  Multifractal Moments Analysis





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For further Informations please contact Haungs@kit.edu

  To the homepage of Andreas Haungs.