Discharge quenching mechanism and performance of RPWELL with tunable 3D printed resistive plates, charge evacuation in semiconductive glass RPWELL and discharge quenching for Cryogenic-RWELL over a wide range of resistivity

Abstract

Resistive electrodes are used in gaseous detectors to quench electrical discharges. This helps to protect delicate electrodes and readout electronics and to improve the stability of the detector operation. An RPWELL is a THGEM-based WELL detector with a resistive plate coupled to a conductive anode. Till now, the choice of the resistive plate was limited to a few materials, like LRS Glass and Semitron. These materials have fixed resistivities and, sometimes, thickness and area limitations. This restricts the potential usage of the detector to a rather small range of applications, as well as the possibility of studying in depth the physics processes governing the discharge quenching mechanism. In our present study, we used a new plastic material doped with carbon nanotubes to produce resistive plates with a commercial 3D printer. This method has the flexibility to produce samples of different thicknesses and different resistivity values. We describe here the sample production and characterize the RPWELL performance with different resistive plates. In particular we show the dependence of discharge quenching on the thickness and resistivity of the plate. The dynamics of the charge carriers in the material is proposed as an explanation for the long gain recovery time after a discharge.