Penning transfers, a group of processes by which excitation energy is used to ionise the gas, increase the gas gain in some detectors. Both the probability that such transfers occur and the mechanism by which the transfer takes place, vary with the gas composition and pressure. With a view to developing a microscopic electron transport model that takes Penning transfers into account, we use this dependence to identify the transfer mechanisms at play. We do this for a number of argon-based gas mixtures, using gain curves from the literature.

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International audienceAvalanche fluctuations set a limit to the energy and position resolutions that can be reached by gaseous detectors. This paper presents a method based on a laser test-bench to measure the absolute gain and the relative gain variance of a Micro-Pattern Gaseous Detector from its single-electron response. A Micromegas detector was operated with three binary gas mixtures, composed of 5% isobutane as a quencher, with argon, neon or helium, at atmospheric pressure. The anode signals were read out by low-noise, high-gain Cremat CR-110 charge preamplifiers to enable single-electron detection down to gain of 5× 103 for the first time. The argon mixture shows the lowest gain at a given amplification field together with the lowest breakdown limit, which is at a gain of 2×104 an order of magnitude lower than that of neon or helium. For each gas, the relative gain variance f is almost unchanged in the range of amplification field studied. It was found that f is twice higher (f~0.6) in argon than in the two other mixtures. This hierarchy of gain and relative gain variance agrees with predictions of analytic models, based on gas ionisation yields, and a Monte-Carlo model included in the simulation software Magboltz version 10.1