A Time Projection Chamber for continuous readout

A Time Projection Chamber (TPC) with its 3-dimensional tracking and particle identification capabilities is a very powerful detector for high multiplicity events. TPCs are used for tracking in several experiments such as ALICE, STAR and many others. A drawback of such devices is the restriction to trigger rates of the order of 1 kHz due to the necessity of a gating grid which prevents ions produced in the amplification region of MWPCs from entering the drift volume. A GEM-TPC has been built which is the GEM-TPC with the largest active volume up to date. The detector has been commissioned with cosmics and particle beams at the FOPI experiment at GSI, and was employed for a physics measurement with a pion beam.