HIGH RATE RESISTIVE PLATE CHAMBERS: AN INEXPENSIVE, FAST, LARGE AREA DETECTOR OF ENERGETIC CHARGED PARTICLES FOR ACCELERATOR AND NON-ACCELERATOR APPLICATIONS

Resistive Plate Chambers, or RPCs, have been used until recently as large area detectors of cosmic ray muons. They are now finding use as fast large-area trigger and muon detection systems for different high energy physics detectors such the L3 Detector at LEP and future detectors to be built at the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.1,2 RPC systems at these accelerators must operate with high efficiency, providing nanosecond timing resolution in particle fluences up to a few tens of kHz/cm2 - with thousands of square meters of active area. RPCs are simple and cheap to construct.