Investigations on Important Properties of the 10 cm x 10 cm GEM Prototype

TL;DR

This study investigates the properties of a 10 cm x 10 cm GEM detector prototype, focusing on its gain, efficiency, signal sharing, and uniformity, demonstrating its suitability for various research applications.

Contribution

It provides detailed experimental analysis of the GEM prototype’s electrical and signal properties, highlighting its operational characteristics and potential for research use.

Findings

Gain increases exponentially with voltage, reaching full efficiency above 4100 V.

X strips collect approximately 57% of the total signal.

Efficiency is slightly higher at the center and decreases towards edges.

Abstract

The Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) detector is one of promising particle and radiation detectors that has been improved greatly from previous gas detectors. The improvement includes better spatial resolutions, higher detection rate capabilities, and flexibilities in designs. In particular, the 10 cm x 10 cm GEM prototype is designed and provided by the Gas Detectors Development group (GDD) at CERN, Switzerland. With its simplicity in operations and designs, while still maintaining high qualities, the GEM prototype is suitable for both start-up and advanced researches. This article aims to report the investigations on some important properties of the 10 cm x 10 cm GEM detector using current measurement and signal counting. Results have shown that gains of the GEM prototype exponentially increase as voltage supplied to the detector increases, while the detector reaches full efficiency (plateau region) when the voltage is greater than 4100 V. In terms of signal sharing between X and Y strips of the readout, X strips, which is on the top layer of the readout, collect ~57% of the total signal. For the uniformity test, the GEM prototype has slightly higher efficiencies at the center of the detector and decreases as positions are closer to edges.