High-tolerance nickel metalized glass gas electron multiplier: development and performance evaluation

Abstract

Micro-patterned gas detectors (MPGDs) are an important type of gaseous detector that can amplify and detect a small amount of electric charge generated by the interaction between radiation and gas. These detectors have high gain and high spatial resolution, making them useful in various applications ranging from high energy physics to medical instrumentation. However, one of the most widely used MPGDs, Gaseous Electron Multipliers (GEMs), may often experiences electrical discharges due to excessive electric field in the small space, which reduces their durability. To address this issue, we previously have developed a new type of GEM that uses glass as the insulator instead of conventional materials. Our glass GEM demonstrated excellent gas gain and energy resolution characteristics. In this work, we used nickel as the electrode, which has a higher melting point than copper and showed higher durability against arc discharges. Moreover, the nickel glass GEM performed comparably to conventional Cu-based glass GEMs in evaluation using radiation isotopes. Our findings suggest that our new glass GEM with nickel electrodes is a promising solution to the durability problem of conventional GEMs. This could lead to improvements in the performance and longevity of MPGDs, which could have significant implications for various applications in the fields of physics, engineering, and medicine.