A new construction technique of high granularity and high transparency drift chambers for modern high energy physics experiments

Modern experiments for the search of extremely rare processes require high resolutions (order of 50200 keV/c) tracking systems for particle momenta in the range of 50-300 MeV/c, dominated by multiple scattering contributions. We will present a newly developed construction technique for ultra-low mass Drift Chambers fulfilling this goal. It consists of (1) a semiautomatic wiring machine with a high degree of control over wire mechanical tensioning (better than 0.2 g) and over wire positioning (of the order of 20 pm) for simultaneous wiring of multi-wire layers; (2) a contact-less IR laser soldering tool designed for a feed-through-less wire anchoring system; (3) an automatic handling system for storing and transporting the multi-wire layers to be placed over the drift chamber end-plates. These techniques have been successfully implemented at INFN-Lecce and University of Salento and are currently being used for the construction of Drift Chamber of the MEG (mu -> e gamma) upgrade experiment. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.