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We describe 14 m 2 hexagonal planar drift chambers designed for the neutrino experiment of the CERN-Dortmund-Heidelberg-Saclay Collaboration. Details on mechanical construction, electronic read-out, results on efficiency and accuracy are presented.

We describe the design, construction and performance of a large mass detector used at CERN to study high-energy neutrino interactions in iron. This detector combines magnetic spectrometry and hadron calorimetry techniques.

In proportional chambers, working at atmospheric pressure, with sense wires of 100 μm, high amplification in the proportional mode is limited by a special type of discharge: a Geiger pulse of limited extension along the wire, of the order of 1 cm, with a large local dead time, of the order of 0.3 ms. This gives rise to some unpleasant phenomena in large multi-wire drift chambers using thick wires but may lead to cheap large detectors for low counting rates.

The energy resolution and response of a segmented iron-scintillator total absorption calorimeter has been measured for pion energies from 10 to 140 GeV and for electron energies up to 50 GeV. A procedure has been found to weight individual counter responses for hadron showers which results in improved energy resolution at high energies and a nearly linear dependence of response on hadron energy above 30 GeV. There is evidence in the data that this weighting procedure compensates for fluctuations in energy deposition due to the electromagnetic component of the hadronic shower. For an iron sampling thickness of 2.5 cm the hadron energy resolution follows a 0.58 E law, while the resolution for electromagnetic showers is 0.23 E .