Aging effect in the BESIII drift chamber

As the main tracking detector of BESIII, the drift chamber provides accurate measurements of the position and the momentum of the charged particles produced in e+e-collisions at BEPCII. After six years of operation, the drift chamber is suffering from aging problems due to huge beam-related background. The gains of the cells in the first ten layers show an obvious decrease, reaching a maximum decrease of about 29% for the first layer cells. Two calculation methods for the gain change(Bhabha events and accumulated charges with 0.3% aging ratio for inner chamber cells) give almost the same results. For the Malter effect encountered by the inner drift chamber in January 2012, about 0.2% water vapor was added to the MDC gas mixture to solve this cathode aging problem.These results provide an important reference for MDC operating high voltage settings and the upgrade of the inner drift chamber.