Gas electron multipliers with metal electrodes and their applications in detectors

TL;DR

This paper reviews gas electron multipliers with metal electrodes, highlighting their advantages, experimental results with various gas mixtures, and potential applications in dark matter detection.

Contribution

It introduces GEMs with metal electrodes that eliminate plastic insulators, reducing leakage and spark issues, and discusses their design, operation, and large-scale construction plans.

Findings

GEMs with metal electrodes show reduced leakage currents.

Experimental results with specific gas mixtures demonstrate detector performance.

Plans for large-scale MGEM detector construction are presented.

Abstract

Gas electron multipliers (GEMs) with wire (WGEMs) or metal electrodes (MGEMs), which don't use any plastic insulators between the electrodes are created. The absence of plastic insulation between the electrodes of WGEMs excludes unwanted leakage currents and spark breakdowns between the electrodes. Accidental spark events in such MGEM don't lead to their failure as far as positive ions quickly move away from the breakdown region by a strong electric field in the gap region. In this work, we present a review of such GEMs. The chambers containing MGEMs (WGEMs) with pin-anodes are proposed as detectors for searching of interactions between Dark Matter particles and hydrogen (H2). In this paper, we present a review of such chambers. For investigation of the gas mixtures (Ar+10% H2, Ne+10%H2, H2 +3ppmTMAE), the chamber containing WGEM with pin-anodes detection system was constructed. In this paper we present the results of an experimental study of these gaseous mixtures exited by an alpha source. Finally, we discuss principles of operation of GEMs with pin-anodes as well as plans for constructing of large scale (150 mm x 150 mm) MGEM detectors.