Study of timing response and charge spectra of glass based Resistive Plate Chamber detectors for INO-ICAL experiment

Abstract

Resistive Plate chambers (RPCs) are robust and affordable gaseous detectors that combine low cost with excellent timing, good spatial resolution and fast response to the incoming particles. The India Based Neutrino Observatory is an approved project aimed at building a magnetised Iron Calorimeter (ICAL) detector to study Neutrino physics and related issues. The ICAL experiment will utilize about 29000 RPC's as active detector elements, sandwiched between alternate plates of thick iron. The RPC detectors will be used to detect muons produced from the atmospheric neutrinos interaction with an iron target. The spatial information of the muons will be extracted from the two dimensional readout and the hit position in the respective layers. The up going and down going directionality will be obtained using the time stamp of hits in the active detectors. The charge induced by the particle and its behaviour with respect to the applied voltage play a significant role in designing the readout electronics for the detector. In this paper, we present the timing and charge measurement of single gap glass based RPC detectors. We will also report about studies on the dependence of the timing and charge response of these RPC detectors as a function of the gas composition.