Novel method for in-situ drift velocity measurement in large volume TPCs: the Geometry Reference Chamber of the NA61/SHINE experiment at CERN

This paper presents a novel method for low maintenance, low ambiguity in-situ drift velocity monitoring in large volume Time Projection Chambers (TPCs). The method was developed and deployed for the 40m^3 TPC tracker system of the NA61/SHINE experiment at CERN, which has a one meter of drift length. The method relies on a low-cost multi-wire proportional chamber (MWPC) placed downstream of the TPCs to be monitored. The drift velocity is then determined by matching the reconstructed tracks in the TPC to the hits of the pertinent monitoring chamber, called Geometry Reference Chamber (GRC), which is then used as a differential length scale. An important design requirement on the GRC was minimal added complexity to the existing system, in particular, compatibility with Front-End Electronics (FEE) cards already used to read out the TPCs. Moreover, the GRC system was designed to operate both in large and small particle flux. The system is capable of monitoring the evolution of the in-situ drift velocity down to a one permil precision, with a few minutes of time sampling.