Study of RPCs for autonomous stations in cosmic ray research

Abstract

The capability of covering very large areas at low cost, besides showing excellent performance in many aspects, motivated the application of RPCs to Nuclear and High Energy Physics and also to Cosmic Ray research in experiments such as COVER-PLASTEX and ARGO/YBJ. Such detectors, however, require indoor conditions and support systems. For very high energy cosmic ray research, where shower sampling is mandatory, it would be convenient to develop detectors that could be deployed in small standalone stations, with very sparse opportunities for maintenance, and with good resilience to environmental conditions. With this aim we developed glass RPCs that are confined to a sealed plastic box housing all high voltage and gas distribution. The detector is impervious to humidity and requires only 0.4 cc/min of gas flow rate, equivalent to 1 kg/year of R-134a. Arbitrary readout electrodes can be applied externally.

TRAGALDABAS: a new RPC based detector for the regular study of cosmic rays

“…For this reason we decided to improve the isolation of the detector's room and to install airconditioning able to keep the temperature stable in the range (20 ± 0.5 • C). The mean value of the current is of the order of ∼600 nA for the upper plane, slightly higher than the one reported in [9] for a quite smaller detector and with narrower gaps. Nor correlations neither dependences have been observed between the dark current of the detector and both the pressure and the ambient humidity.…”

The TRISTAN detector. Cosmic ray survey between latitudes 38ºN and 53ºS along the Atlantic Ocean

“…One of them is the use of Resistive Plate Chambers (RPC) as main detection technique. This technology offers also a broad choice of design possibilities offering either time resolution below 100 ps or sub-millimetric performances [7]. Nowadays, four TRASGO detectors are operative or under development.…”

The TRISTAN Antarctic Cosmic Ray detector.

“…TRISTAN has been built based on RPC technology. The detector has three active RPC planes built by LIP Coimbra and Hydronav [8]. Each plane has an active size of 1.2x1.5 m 2 and the read out is performed by 30 Cu pads instrumented with the fast HADES FEE electronics [4] [7].…”