Study of resistive plate chambers for muon detection at hadron colliders

Abstract We present the performance of a hodoscope made of resistive plate chambers (RPC) installed in the RD5 experiment at CERN and exposed to beams of high energy muons and pions. The efficiency as a function of the particle flux is studied for different resistivities. A substantial improvement is obtained with plates of lower resistivity. Tracking muons through the RPC and using the bending power of a 2.7 Tm iron toroid, a simple trigger algorithm is used to select large momentum muons.