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 from 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 cluster counting technique. The ionization process by charged particles is the primary mechanism used for particle identification (dE/dx). However, the significant uncertainties in the total energy deposition represent a limit to the particle separation capabilities. The cluster counting technique (dN/dx) takes advantage of the Poisson nature of the primary ionization process and offers a more statistically robust method to infer mass information. This paper will describe the simulation campaign and the two beam tests performed at CERN to investigate and prove the potentials of the cluster counting technique.