Operation of a low resistivity glass MRPC at high rate using ecological gas

Abstract

The Multigap Resistive Plate Chamber (MRPC) is a gaseous detector that has low building costs and excellent timing performances. It is usually operated using a mixture of C2F4H2 and SF6, which have very high Global Warming Potential (GWP) values (1430 and 23,900 respectively). The ecological HFO-1234ze (C3F4H2), GWP <7, was investigated if it could be a viable alternative to the standard gas mixture. In this work, we present the performances of an MRPC with 10 gaps of 235μm width, built using 0.5 mm thick plates of low resistive glass. This detector was also operated using the standard gas mixture for comparison. At low particle rate, this detector reaches an efficiency of 98% and a time resolution of around 70 ps for the two mixtures of gases. We observed no degradation of its performances when a limited size of its active area is exposed to particle rates up to 63 kHz/cm2.