Development of Thick-foil and Fine-pitch GEMs with a Laser Etching Technique

TL;DR

This paper reports on the development of thick-foil and fine-pitch GEMs using laser etching and a new Liquid Crystal Polymer insulator, achieving high gain, stability, and uniformity for advanced particle detection applications.

Contribution

Introduces a novel laser etching method with Liquid Crystal Polymer for producing high-quality thick-foil and fine-pitch GEMs with improved yield and performance.

Findings

Effective gain of 10^4 at 720 V for thick-foil GEMs.

Gain stability within 0.5% over 3 hours of operation.

Uniform hole diameter distribution with 3% standard deviation.

Abstract

We have produced thick-foil and fine-pitch gas electron multipliers (GEMs) using a laser etching technique. To improve production yield we have employed a new material, Liquid Crystal Polymer, instead of polyimide as an insulator layer. The effective gain of the thick-foil GEM with a hole pitch of 140 um, a hole diameter of 70 um, and a thickness of 100 um reached a value of 10^4 at an applied voltage of 720 V. The measured effective gain of the thick-foil and fine-pitch GEM (80 um pitch, 40 um diameter, and 100 um thick) was similar to that of the thick-foil GEM. The gain stability was measured for the thick-foil and fine-pitch GEM, showing no significant increase or decrease as a function of elapsed time from applying the high voltage. The gain stability over 3 h of operation was about 0.5%. Gain mapping across the GEM showed a good uniformity with a standard deviation of about 4%. The distribution of hole diameters across the GEM was homogeneous with a standard deviation of about 3%. There was no clear correlation between the gain and hole diameter maps.