MRPC3b mass production for CBM-TOF and eTOF at STAR

TL;DR

This paper discusses the mass production and deployment of MRPC3b detectors for the CBM-TOF and eTOF systems at STAR, focusing on their design, production, and integration for high-rate particle identification in heavy-ion collision experiments.

Contribution

It introduces the mass production process of MRPC3b detectors designed for high-rate environments in CBM-TOF and STAR upgrades, highlighting their construction with thin float glass for improved performance.

Findings

Successful mass production of MRPC3b detectors completed.

Deployment of 36% of MRPC3b counters in STAR's east endcap.

Detectors meet the flux and rate requirements for CBM-TOF and STAR upgrades.

Abstract

The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) spectrometer aims to study strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions. The key element providing hadron identification at incident energies between 2 and 11 AGeV in heavy-ion collisions at the SIS100 accelerator is a Time-of-Flight (TOF) wall covering the polar angular range from $2.5^0$ --$25^0$ and full azimuth. CBM is expected to be operational in the year 2024 at the Facility for Anti-proton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt, Germany. The existing conceptual design foresees a 120 m^2 TOF-wall composed of Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPC) which is subdivided into a high rate region, a middle rate region and a low rate region. The MRPC3b Multistrip-MRPCs, foreseen to be integrated in the low rate region, have to cope with charged particle fluxes up to 1 kHz/cm2 and therefore will be constructed with thin float glass (0.28 mm thickness) as resistive electrode material. In the scope of the FAIR phase 0 program it is planned to install about 36 \% of the MRPC3b counters in the east endcap region of the STAR experiment at BNL as an upgrade for the Beam Energy Scan campaign (BESII) in 2019/2020.