The cosmic ray test of MRPCs for the BESIII ETOF upgrade

TL;DR

This paper reports on the cosmic ray testing of MRPC detectors for the BESIII ETOF upgrade, demonstrating improved time resolution, high efficiency, and low noise, confirming system readiness for enhanced particle identification.

Contribution

The study presents the successful implementation and testing of a new MRPC-based ETOF system with integrated electronics, achieving target performance metrics for the upgrade.

Findings

MRPC time resolution better than 100 ps

Efficiency around 98%

Noise rate below 1 Hz/(cm^2)

Abstract

In order to improve the particle identification capability of the Beijing Spectrometer III (BESIII),t is proposed to upgrade the current endcap time-of-flight (ETOF) detector with multi-gap resistive plate chamber (MRPC) technology. Aiming at extending ETOF overall time resolution better than 100ps, the whole system including MRPC detectors, new-designed Front End Electronics (FEE), CLOCK module, fast control boards and time to digital modules (TDIG), was built up and operated online 3 months under the cosmic ray. The main purposes of cosmic ray test are checking the detectors' construction quality, testing the joint operation of all instruments and guaranteeing the performance of the system. The results imply MRPC time resolution better than 100$ps$, efficiency is about 98$\%$ and the noise rate of strip is lower than 1$Hz/$($scm^{2}$) at normal threshold range, the details are discussed and analyzed specifically in this paper. The test indicates that the whole ETOF system would work well and satisfy the requirements of upgrade.