Status of technology of MRPC time of flight system

Abstract

TOF (Time Of Flight) system based on MRPC (Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chamber) technology is widely used in modern physics experiments, and it also plays an important role in particle identification. With the increase of accelerator energy and luminosity, the TOF system is required to identify definite particles precisely under high rate environment. The MRPC technology TOF system can be defined as three generations. The first generation TOF is based on float glass MRPC and its time resolution is around 80 ps, but the rate is relatively low (typically lower than a few hundred Hz/cm2). The typical systems are TOF of RHIC-STAR, LHC-ALICE and BES III endcap. For the second generation TOF, its time resolution is in the same order with the first generation, but the rate capability is much higher. Its rate capability can reach 30 kHz/cm2. The typical experiment with this high rate TOF is FAIR-CBM. The biggest challenge is on the third generation TOF. For example, the momentum upper limit of K/PI separation is around 7 GeV/c for JLab-SoLID TOF system under high particle rate as high as 20 kHz/cm2, the time requirement is around 20 ps. The readout electronics of the first two generations is based on time over threshold method and pulse shape sampling technology will be used in the third generation TOF. In the same time, the machine learning technology is also designed to analyze the time performance. In this paper, we will describe the evolution of MRPC TOF technology and key technology of each generation TOF.