DEVELOPMENT OF A MICROSTRIP GAS CHAMBER AS A TIME-RESOLVED AREA DETECTOR

A two-dimensional microstrip gas chamber (MSGC) has been developed wit h a 10 cm-square detection area and an ultrafast read-out system. The MSGC was made using multi-chip module (MCM) technology, and has a very thin substrate of 17 mu m and many anodes and back strips, both with 200 mu m pitches. The new read-out system, in which the hit addresses of the electrodes were sequentially encoded to the hit positions by a synchronous clock, handles data rates of up to 107 events s(-1) from M SGCs. This enables the acquisition of fast and sequential digital imag es. Furthermore, since the MSGC is a real photon-counting detector, th e timing of the photons, to an accuracy of a few tens of nanoseconds, and energy can be recorded. Here, the performance of the MSGC system a s a real-time area detector is reported, and the abilities of this sys tem are discussed.