Limited streamer chambers for the Large Volume Detector

The tracking system of the Large Volume Detector, an underground experiment to study muons and nutrino astronomy, will use ~15000 limited streamer chambers. We describe a comparison between the standard binary mixture (30% argon + 70% isobutane) and a low-hydrocarbon ternary mixture (2% argon + 10% isobutane + 88% carbon dioxide). The ternary composition results in a 400-volt-shorter single count-rate plateau, a 20% smaller primary streamer pulse-height, and a much higher streamer multiplicity. The count-rate plateaux have also been studied over a wide composition range of isobutane, argon, and carbon dioxide mixtures. We also discuss the streamer chamber quality control procedures and the results obtained from a sample of 2900 devices operated with the binary mixture.