多气隙电阻板室飞行时间谱仪技术

基于多气隙电阻板室(MRPC)技术的飞行时间谱仪广泛应用于现代物理实验,并在粒子鉴别中发挥了重要作用.随着加速器能量和实验亮度的提高,对飞行时间谱仪的粒子计数率和时间分辨要求越来越高.MRPC飞行时间谱仪按技术上可以分成三代.从第一代到第三代,计数率要求越来越高( 30 kHz/cm~2),时间精度也更加严格(20 ps),相应的探测器结构和读出电子学系统呈现出不同的特性.本文总结了三代飞行时间谱仪技术的主要技术特点及主要物理实验,介绍了已经取得的应用成果,提出了该技术的未来发展方向.同时也介绍了MRPC探测器在工业及医学方面的应用.

Time of flight technology based on multi-gap resistive plate chamber

Particle identification is very important in nuclear and particle physics experiments. Time of flight system (TOF) plays an important role in particle identification such as the separation of pion, kaon and proton. Multi-gap resistive plate chamber (MRPC) is a new kind of avalanche gas detector and it has excellent time resolution power. The intrinsic time resolution of narrow gap MRPC is less than 10 ps. So the MRPC technology TOF system is widely used in modern physics experiments for particle identification. With the increase of accelerator energy and luminosity, the TOF system is required to indentify definite particles precisely under high rate environment. The MRPC technology TOF system can be defined as three generations according to the timing and rate requirement. The first-generation TOF is based on the float glass MRPC and its time resolution is around 80 ps, but the rate is relatively low (typically lower than 100 Hz/cm²). The typical systems are TOF of RHIC-STAR, LHC-ALICE and BES Ⅲ endcap. For the second-generation TOF, its time resolution has the same order as that for 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 in the third-generation TOF. For example, the momentum upper limit of K/π separation is around 7 GeV/c for JLab-SoLID TOF system under high particle rate as high as 20 kHz/cm², and the time requirement is around 20 ps. The readout electronics of 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 LSTM network is also used to analyze the time performance. As a very successful sample, MRPC barrel TOF has been used in RHIC-STAR for more than ten years and many important physics results have been obtained. A prominent result is the observation of antimatter helium-4 nucleus. This discovery proves the existence of antimatter in the early universe. In this paper, we will describe the evolution of MRPC TOF technology and key technology of each generation of TOFs including MRPC detector and related electronics. The industrial and medical usage of MRPC are also introduced in the work finally.