In-beam evaluation of a medium-size Resistive-Plate WELL gaseous particle detector

TL;DR

This paper reports on the in-beam testing of a medium-sized Resistive Plate WELL detector, demonstrating high efficiency and stability, advancing its potential for large-area particle detection applications like calorimetry.

Contribution

It presents the first in-beam evaluation of a full-scale Resistive Plate WELL detector, confirming its high performance and stability for practical large-area particle detection.

Findings

Achieved >98% detection efficiency with stable operation.

Maintained low pad multiplicity (~1.2) at high rates.

Demonstrated suitability for large-area applications like calorimetry.

Abstract

In-beam evaluation of a fully-equipped medium-size 30$\times$30 cm$^2$ Resistive Plate WELL (RPWELL) detector is presented. It consists here of a single element gas-avalanche multiplier with Semitron ESD225 resistive plate, 1 cm$^2$ readout pads and APV25/SRS electronics. Similarly to previous results with small detector prototypes, stable operation at high detection efficiency (>98%) and low average pad multiplicity (~1.2) were recorded with 150 GeV muon and high-rate pion beams, in Ne/(5%CH$_4$), Ar/(5%CH$_4$) and Ar/(7%CO$_2$). This is an important step towards the realization of robust detectors suitable for applications requiring large-area coverage; among them Digital Hadron Calorimetry.