Development of Parallel Plate Avalanche Counter for heavy ion collision in radioactive ion beam

Abstract We have developed a position-sensitive Parallel Plate Avalanche Counter (PPAC) to detect the fission fragments and reconstruct the fission reaction plane in the experiment of studying nuclear equation of state (nEOS) by means of heavy ion collision (HIC). This experiment put forward high requirements for the performances of PPAC, such as the time resolution, efficiency and position resolution. According to these requirements we designed the PPAC with an active area of 240 mm × 280  mm working at low gas pressure. The results show that time resolution could be less than 300 picoseconds. Position resolution is consistent with the theoretical calculation about 1.35 mm. Detection efficiency could be approaching 100% gradually with the voltage increasing in different gas pressures. The performances of PPAC have also been verified in beam experiment. Each set of anode wires can be accurately separated in the position spectrum. In the beam experiment, we also got the back-to-back correlation of fission fragments which is one of the direct signals characterizing binary decay.