Abstract
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 0.6-2.5 V 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 greater than 95% is calculated, for operation of the detector over a 100 V wide span of high voltages (HV). Over this same HV range, the background rate per pixel was measured to be 3-4 orders of magnitude lower than the rate with which the cell was 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. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.