As part of our contribution to the GlueX experiment at Jefferson Lab, the Carnegie Mellon University group has built the central drift chamber for the experiment. This detector is a 1.5 meter long, 1.2 meter diameter cylinder that contains over 3500 straw tubes. A 20-micron diameter gold-plated tungsten wire is strung down the center of each tube and the detector is electronically read out at the upstream end of the Glue Experiment. The most detailed information on the detector can be found on the GlueX Wiki under the Central Drift Chamber link. Construction of the detector started in summer of 2010 and the final chamber was delivered to Jefferson Lab in October of 2013. The detector is shown about one-quarter of the way into construction in the clean room at Carnegie Mellon.

In order to build this detector a team of four technicians and a Research Scientist were occupied for the entire time of the project. The detector was installed in the GlueX experiment in March of 2014, as shown in the picture below. It was hooked up to the data acquisition system in June of 2014, and cosmic events have been read out since that time.