Measurement of ion and electron drift velocity and electronic attachment in air for ionization chambers

Abstract

Air-ionization chambers have been used in radiotherapy and particle therapy for decades. However, fundamental parameters in action in the detector responses are sparsely studied. In this work we aimed to measure the electronic attachment, electrons and ions mobilities of an ionization chamber (IC) in air. The main idea is to extract these from the actual response of the IC to a single ionizing particle in order to insure that they were measured in the same condition they are to be used while neglecting undesired phenomena: recombination and space charge effect. The non-standard signal shape analysis performed here were also confronted to a more standard drift chamber measurements using time-of-flight. It was found that both detectors displayed compatible results concerning positive and negative ions drift velocities where literature data is well spread out. In the same time, electron attachment measurements sit in the middle of known measurements while electron drift velocities seemed to show an offset compared to the well known and modeled data.