A new type of gaseous micropattern particle detector based on a closed-cell microcavity plasma panel sensor is reported. The first device was fabricated with 1 x 1 x 2 mm cells. It has shown very clean signals of 0.6 to 2.5 volt amplitude, fast rise time of approximately 2 ns and FWHM of about 2 ns with very uniform signal shapes across all pixels. From initial measurements with beta particles from a radioactive source, a maximum pixel efficiency of greater than 95% is calculated, for operation of the detector over a 100V wide span of high voltages (HV). Over this same HV range, the background rate per pixel was measured to be 3 to 4 orders of magnitude lower than the rate with the cell illuminated by the beta source. Pixel-to-pixel count rate uniformity is within 3% and stable within 3% for many days. The time resolution is 2.4 ns, and a very low cell-to-cell crosstalk has been measured between cells separated by 2 mm.
@article{arxiv.1407.6491,
title = {First results with a microcavity plasma panel detector},
author = {R. Ball and M. Ben-Moshe and Y. Benhammou and R. Bensimon and J. W. Chapman and M. Davies and E. Etzion and C. Ferretti and P. S. Friedman and D. S. Levin and Y. Silver and R. L. Varner and C. Weaverdyck and B. Zhou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.6491},
year = {2015}
}