Development of a Resistive Plate Chamber with Heat Strengthened Glass

The Iron Calorimeter (ICAL) detector at INO cavern will be made of 50 kTon of magnetized steel layers, tiled with 4 m \(\times \) 2 m \(\times \) 56 mm thick plates, alternating with layers of RPCs. The total number of \(2 \times 2\) m\(^2\) RPCs required will be about 29000. However, during the assembly of RPCs, handling the \(2 \times 2\) m\(^2\) normal float glass of thickness 3 mm is both difficult and risky and will be much easier to handle RPCs with toughened or tempered glass. This paper presents a comparison of the characteristics, such as noise rate, dark current, muon detection efficiency and time resolution, of normal and hardened glass RPCs.