An upgraded asymmetric e+e- flavor factory, SuperKEKB, is planned at KEK. It will deliver a luminosity of 8 x 10^35 cm^-2 s^-1, allowing precision measurements in the flavor sector which can probe new physics well beyond the scales accessible to dire
ct observation. The increased luminosity also requires upgrades of the Belle detector. Of critical importance here is a new silicon pixel vertex tracker, which will significantly improve the decay vertex resolution. This new detector will consist of two detector layers close to the interaction point, using DEPFET pixel sensors with 50 um thick silicon in the active area.
A time projection chamber (TPC) is a strong candidate for the central tracker of the international linear collider (ILC) experiment and we have been conducting a series of cosmic ray experiments under a magnetic field up to 4 T, using a small prototy
pe TPC with a replaceable readout device: multi-wire proportional chamber (MWPC) or gas electron multiplier (GEM). We first confirmed that the MWPC readout could not be a fall-back option of the ILC-TPC under a strong axial magnetic field of 4 T since its spatial resolution suffered severely from the so called E x B effect in the vicinity of the wire planes. The GEM readout, on the other hand, was found to be virtually free from the E x B effect as had been expected and gave the resolution determined by the transverse diffusion of the drift electrons (diffusion limited). Furthermore, GEMs allow a wider choice of gas mixtures than MWPCs. Among the gases we tried so far a mixture of Ar-CF4-isobutane, in which MWPCs could be prone to discharges, seems promising as the operating gas of the ILC-TPC because of its small diffusion constant especially under a strong magnetic field. We report the measured drift properties of this mixture including the diffusion constant as a function of the electric field and compare them with the predictions of Magboltz. Also presented is the spatial resolution of a GEM-based ILC-TPC estimated from the measurement with the prototype.
