Simulation of three-dimensional electrostatic field configuration in wire chambers: A novel approach

Three-dimensional field configuration has been simulated for a simple wire chamber consisting of one anode wire stretched along the axis of a grounded square cathode tube by solving numerically the boundary integral equation of the first kind. A closed-form expression of potential due to charge distributed over flat rectangular surface has been invoked in the solver using Green's function formalism leading to a nearly exact computation of electrostatic field. The solver has been employed to study the effect of several geometrical attributes such as the aspect ratio (λ=l/d, defined as the ratio of the length l of the tube to its width d) and the wire modeling on the field configuration. Detailed calculation has revealed that the field values deviate from the analytic estimates significantly when the λ is reduced to 2 or below. The solver has demonstrated the effect of wire modeling on the accuracy of the estimated near-field values in the amplification region. The thin wire results can be reproduced by the polygon model incorporating a modest number of surfaces (⩾32) in the calculation with an accuracy of more than 99%. The smoothness in the three-dimensional field calculation in comparison to fluctuations produced by other methods has been observed.