Particle identification with the cluster counting technique for the IDEA drift chamber

IDEA (Innovative Detector for an Electron–positron Accelerator) is a general-purpose detector concept, designed to study electron–positron collisions in a wide energy range in a very large circular leptonic collider. Its drift chamber is designed to provide an efficient tracking, a high precision momentum measurement and an excellent particle identification by exploiting the application of the cluster counting technique. To investigate the potential of the cluster counting techniques on physics events, a simulation of the ionization cluster generation is needed, therefore we developed an algorithm which can use the energy deposit information provided by the Geant4 toolkit to reproduce, in a fast and convenient way, the cluster number and cluster size distributions. The results obtained confirm that the cluster counting technique allows to reach a resolution two times better than the traditional dE/dx method. A beam test has been performed during November 2021 at CERN on the H8 beam line to validate the simulations results, to define the limiting effects for a fully efficient cluster counting and to count the number of electron clusters released by an ionizing track at a fixed βγ as a function of the track angle. The simulation and the beam test results will be described briefly in this issue.