Research and Development of Commercially Manufactured Large GEM Foils

Abstract

With future experiments proposing detectors that utilize very large-area GEM foils, there is a need for commercially available GEM foils. Double-mask etching techniques pose a clear limitation in the maximum size of GEM foils. In contrast, single-mask techniques developed at CERN would allow one to overcome those limitations. However with interest in GEM foils increasing and CERN being the only main distributor, keeping up with the demand for GEM foils will be difficult. Thus the commercialization of GEMs has been established by Tech-Etch of Plymouth, MA, USA using single-mask techniques. We report on the electrical and geometrical properties, along with the inner and outer hole diameter size uniformity of 10 $\times$ 10 cm${}^2$ and 40$\times$40 cm${}^2$ GEM foils. The Tech-Etch foils were found to have excellent electrical properties. The measured mean optical properties were found to reflect the desired parameters and are consistent with those measured in double-mask GEM foils, and show good hole diameter uniformity over the active area. These foils are well suited for future applications in nuclear and particle physics where tracking devices are needed.

Submitted to NIM A

References in corpus (5)

• Electron Ion Collider: The Next QCD Frontier - Understanding the glue that binds us all
• Progress on large area GEMs (VCI 2010)
• Development of Tracking Detectors with industrially produced GEM Foils
• Large Size GEM for Super Bigbite Spectrometer (SBS) Polarimeter for Hall A 12 GeV program at JLab
• Beam Performance of Tracking Detectors with Industrially Produced GEM Foils

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Development, Characterization and Qualification of first GEM foils produced in India
• Production and validation of industrially produced large-sized GEM foils for the Phase-2 upgrade of the CMS muon spectrometer