  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 application of the cluster counting technique. To investigate
the potential of the cluster counting techniques on physics events, a
simulation of the ionization clusters generation is needed, therefore we
developed an algorithm which can use the energy deposit information provided by
Geant4 toolkit to reproduce, in a fast and convenient way, the clusters number
distribution and the cluster size distribution. The results obtained confirm
that the cluster counting technique allows to reach a resolution 2 times better
than the traditional dE/dx method. A beam test has been performed during
November 2021 at CERN on the H8 to validate the simulations results, to define
the limiting effects for a fully efficient cluster counting and to count the
number of electron clusters released by an ionizing track at a fixed
$\beta\gamma$ as a function of the track angle. The simulation and the beam
test results will be described briefly in this issue.

High Energy Physics - Experiment;Instrumentation and Detectors