The Use of Transition Radiation for the Detection of Highly Relativistic Charged Particles,

摘要

The objective of this research was to measure the ratio of a charged particle's total energy to its rest mass,or to measure the 'gamma'of a particle using of transition radiation. A special design,detector has been constructed to determine the operational parameters for a transition radiation. This initial detector design did not work because of anticipated low detecting efficiencies. The design later worked on utilizing a wide gap spark chamber operating in the streamer mode. However,final operational problems of the spark chamber has stalled the work before the acomplishment of this study. The immediate application intended for the detector was to obtain a correlation between the energy and the direction of arrival of very high energy cosmic rays. This correlation would be an important extension of a continuing study of the origins of cosmic rays. The writer believes,once streamer operation is obtained,the application of transition radiation can readily follow to determine a particle's energy. (Author)