Characteristic study of plastic sheet based RPC detector

The Resistive Plate Chamber (RPC) was introduced in 1981 by R. Santonico and R. Cardarelli. It is a gaseous particle tracking detector utilizing a constant and uniform electric field produced in between two parallel plate electrodes, which is made of a material with high bulk resistivity. Usually glass or Bakelite materials are used as electrodes. Due to larger area coverage requirement and brittle in nature, glass seems to be not suitable. Now the acrylic material sheets are used as electrodes, which is easily foldable and unbreakable as well as light in weight that may allow use in the development of cheap and robust medical imaging devices. The surface resistivity of acrylic sheet is in between 10¹⁰–10¹² ohm/cm². High resistivity of electrodes prevent the spread of collected charge and low conductivity support the application of high voltage over electrodes surface which will be necessary to maintain the discharge between electrodes. It is observed from the efficiency plot of RPC gas chamber is that the maximum achieved efficiency is about 80% at 7000 voltage in the middle part of the chamber while at the boundary it is less about 20%. There are much scopes of improvement in this detector and various parameters must be optimized