Research Paper: Evaluating the Performance of a Resistive Plate Chamber by Measurement of the Detector’s Count Rate

Abstract

Resistive plate chamber (RPC) is a gaseous particle detector primarily developed for particle physics experiments and found vast applications in industry. We have constructed a prototype of a single gap glass RPC, with gap width of 2 mm. For simplicity, this prototype has a single 10×10 cm2 Al pad to readout the detector’s signals. An electronic board is designed and built at our laboratory to receive, amplify and register pulses as counts per unit time at the computer. In this study, we have used the count rate (noise) as an indicator of the detector's performance. We observed that the count rate reduced in the presence of Fe shields above the detector, due to the absorption of particles related to the cosmic rays. We also studied the sensitivity of the detector to the 60 keV gammas of the Am source. Although an increase in the count rate in the presence of the 241Am source is evident, the efficiency of the detector to 60 keV gammas is very small. All of the measurements are performed at several high voltages between 1 kV and 3 kV.

Keywords

• resistive plate chamber (rpc)
• gaseous detector
• cosmic muons
• americium source