Development and characterization of six-gap glass MRPCs and feasibility study of a PET device

Abstract

The Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPCs) provide excellent timing as well as position resolutions at relatively low cost. Therefore, they can be used in medical imaging applications such as PET where precise timing is a crucial parameter of measurement. We have designed and fabricated several six-gap glass MRPCs and extensively studied their performance. In this paper, we describe the fabrication and characterization of the detector, the electronics and the data acquisition system of the setup. We present here the result of our Time Of Flight (TOF) experiment using a radioactive source ( 22 Na) hence to demonstrate their potential applications in medical imaging. We also present the Geant4 based simulation results on the efficiency of our detector as a function of the number of gaps and thickness of the converter material.