High rate resistive plate chambers: An inexpensive, fast, large area detector of energetic charged particles for accelerator and non-accelerator applications.

摘要

Resistive Plate Chambers, or RPCs, have been used until recently as large detectors of cosmic ray muons. They are now finding use as fast large-area trigger and muon detection systems for different high energy physics detectors such the L3 Detector at LEP and future detectors to be built at the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. RPC systems at these accelerators must operate with high efficiency, providing nanosecond timing resolution in particle fluences up to a few tens of kHz/cm(sup 2) -- with thousands of square meters of active area. RPCs are simple and cheap to construct. The authors report here recent work on RPCs using new materials that exhibit a combination of desirable RPC features such as low bulk resistivity, high dielectric strength, low mass, and low cost. These new materials were originally developed for use in electronics assembly areas and other applications, where static electric charge buildup can damage sensitive electrical systems.