Outdoor Field Experience with Autonomous RPC Based Stations

Abstract

In the last two decades Resistive Plate Chambers were employed in the Cosmic Ray Experiments COVER-PLASTEX and ARGO/YBJ. In both experiments the detectors were housed indoors, likely owing to gas distribution requirements and the need to control environment variables that directly affect RPCs operational stability. But in experiments where Extended Air Shower (EAS) sampling is necessary, large area arrays composed by dispersed stations are deployed, rendering this kind of approach impossible. In this situation, it would be mandatory to have detectors that could be deployed in small standalone stations, with very rare opportunities for maintenance, and with good resilience to environmental conditions. Aiming to meet these requirements, we started some years ago the development of RPCs for Autonomous Stations. The results from indoor tests and measurements were very promising, both concerning performance and stability under very low gas flow rate, which is the main requirement for Autonomous Stations. In this work we update the indoor results and show the first ones concerning outdoor stable operation. In particular, a dynamic adjustment of the high voltage is applied to keep gas gain constant.

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Atmospheric muons as an imaging tool
• MARTA: A high-energy cosmic-ray detector concept with high-accuracy muon measurement
• Towards Sealed Resistive Plate Chambers
• Atmospheric Temperature Effect in secondary cosmic rays observed with a two square meter ground-based detector
• Studies on the response of a water-Cherenkov detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory to atmospheric muons using an RPC hodoscope
• Long term Experience in Autonomous Stations and production quality control
• Outdoor Systems Performace and Upgrade