Beam test of CBM-TOF MRPC prototype

The Compressed Baryonic Matter spectrometer (CBM) is expected to be operational in the year 2024 at the Facility for Anti-proton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt, Germany. CBM aims to study strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions. The key element providing hadron identification is the Time-Of-Flight (TOF) wall at incident energies between 2 and 10 AGeV . The TOF-wall covers the polar angular range from 2.5o–25o and full azimuth. According to the simulation results, the TOF system is required to reach a time resolution of better than 80 ps for the particle identification (PID) under high rate. The existing conceptual design foresees a 120 m2 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 flux in the low rate region is around 1 kHz/cm2. For this region, we developed a Multistrip-MRPC using thin float glass as the resistive electrode. In this paper, we present the design of these MRPC prototypes and the results obtained during the beam test at the E3 line at Beijing Electron-Positron Collider (BEPC).