A novel fast timing micropattern gaseous detector: FTM

Abstract

In recent years important progress in micropattern gaseous detectors has been achieved in the use of resistive material to build compact spark-protected devices. The novel idea presented here consists of the polarisation of WELL structures using only resistive coating. This allows a new device to be built with an architecture based on a stack of several coupled layers where drift and WELL multiplication stages alternate in the structure. The signals from each multiplication stage can be read out from any external readout boards through the capacitive couplings. Each layer provides a signal with a gain of 10^4-10^5. The main advantage of this new device is the dramatic improvement of the timing provided by the competition of the ionisation processes in the different drift regions, which can be exploited for fast timing at the high luminosity accelerators (e.g. HL-LHC upgrade) as well as far applications like medical imaging.