Certification of industrial manufactures for thin-gap Resistive Plate Chambers

• Published in: 2023 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium, Medical Imaging Conference and International Symposium on Room-Temperature Semiconductor Detectors (NSS MIC RTSD) p. 1
• Main Authors: Bangaru, N., Fallavollita, F., Kroha, H., Kortner, O., Proto, G., Soyk, D., Turkovic, T., Voevodina, E.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 04-11-2023
• Subjects: Companies; Mesons; Production; Reproducibility of results; Semiconductor detectors; Semiconductor device measurement; Technology transfer
• ISSN: 2577-0829
• DOI: 10.1109/NSSMICRTSD49126.2023.10338304

Resistive plate chambers (RPCs) with electrodes of high-pressure phenolic laminate and small gas gap widths down to 1 mm provide large area tracking at relatively low cost in combination with high rate capability and fast response with excellent time resolution of better than 500 ps. They are perfectly suited for experiments requiring sub-nanosecond time resolution and spatial resolution on the order of a few millimeters over large areas. Thin-gap RPCs will therefore be used for the upgrade of the barrel muon system of the ATLAS experiment at HL-LHC and are candidates for the instrumentation of future collider detectors and experiments searching for long-lived particles in experiments like ANUBIS. RPCs are also frequently used in large area cosmic ray detectors. The large demand for RPCs exceeds the presently available production capacities. At the same time, the requirements on mechanical precision, reliability and reproducibility for collider detectors have increased, especially with the reduced gas gap widths. Additional suppliers with industry-style quality assurance are therefore urgently needed. We have established RPC production procedures compliant with industrial requirements and are in the process of certifying several companies for RPC production for the ATLAS upgrade for HL-LHC and beyond. We report about the technology transfer, the RPC prototype production at the selected companies and the results of the certification procedure, as well as their performance and stability measurements in laboratory tests and at CERN SPS X5 120GeV muon beams under high rate 137 Cs irradiation.