Measurement of the trailing edge of cosmic-ray track signals from a round-tube drift chamber

The trailing edge of tube drift-chamber signals for charged particles is expected to provide information concerning the particle passage time. This information may be useful for separating meaningful signals from overlapping garbage at high-rate experiments, such as the future LHC experiments. We carried out a cosmic-ray test using a small tube chamber in order to investigate the feasibility of this idea. We achieved a trailing-edge time resolution of 12 ns in rms by applying simple pulse shaping to eliminate a signal tail. A comparison with a Monte Carlo simulation indicates the importance of well-optimized signal shaping to achieve good resolution. The resolution may be further improved with better shaping.