Preliminary results on the long term operation of RPCs with eco-friendly gas mixtures under irradiation at the CERN Gamma Irradiation Facility

Abstract

Since 2019 a collaboration between researchers from various institutes and experiments (i.e. ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, LHCb/SHiP and the CERN EP-DT group), has been operating several RPCs with diverse electronics, gas gap thicknesses and detector layouts at the CERN Gamma Irradiation Facility (GIF++). The studies aim at assessing the performance of RPCs when filled with new eco-friendly gas mixtures in avalanche mode and in view of evaluating possible ageing effects after long high background irradiation periods, e.g. High-Luminosity LHC phase. This challenging research is also part of a task of the European AidaInnova project. A promising eco-friendly gas identified for RPC operation is the tetrafluoruropropene (C${}_3$H${}_2$F${}_4$, commercially known as HFO-1234ze) that has been studied at the CERN GIF++ in combination with different percentages of CO${}_2$. Between the end of 2021 and 2022 several beam tests have been carried out to establish the performance of RPCs operated with such mixtures before starting the irradiation campaign for the ageing study. Results of these tests for different RPCs layouts and different gas mixtures, under increasing background rates are presented here, together with the preliminary outcome of the detector ageing tests.

References in corpus (3)

• Characterization of tetrafluoropropene-based gas mixtures for the Resistive Plate Chambers of the ALICE muon spectrometer
• A study of HFO-1234ze (1,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene) as an eco-friendly replacement in RPC detectors
• Studies on tetrafluoropropene-based gas mixtures with low environmental impact for Resistive Plate Chambers