Influence of gold coating and interplate voltage on the performance of chevron micro-channel plates for temporally and spatially resolved single particle detection

We present a study of two different sets of Micro-Channel Plates used for time and space resolved single particle detection. We investigate the effects of the gold coating and that of introducing an interplate voltage between the spatially separated plates. We find that the gold coating increases the count rate of the detector and the pulse amplitude as previously reported for non-spatially resolved setups. The interplate voltage also increases count rates. In addition, we find that a non-zero interplate voltage improves the spatial accuracy in determining the arrival position of incoming single particles (by ∼20%) while the gold coating has a negative effect (by ∼30%).