The Central Drift Chamber for GlueX

The Central Drift Chamber is a straw-tube wire chamber of cylindrical structure located surrounding the target inside the bore of the GlueX spectrometer solenoid. Its purpose is to detect and track charged particles with momenta as low as 0.25 GeV/c and to identify low-momentum protons via energy loss. The construction of the detector is described and its operation and calibration are discussed in detail. The design goal of 150 mu m in position resolution has been reached.