Aging and rejuvenation of a TMAE plus methane multiwire photon detector

A UV sensitive multiwire photon detector has been tested as a possible cand idate for the HERA-B RICH detector. The main obstacle to using such a TMAEMethane filled gas detector in a high rate experiment appears to be rapid a ging in the form of prohibitive loss of chamber gas gain. A special circuit has been designed for heating the anode wires in-situ with elevated curren ts, thus evaporating the polymer deposits. Heating almost completely recove rs the initial gain, but this rejuvenation is unfortunately of short durati on. Nevertheless, the cells exposed to periodic heat treatments have an ave rage gain considerably higher than the non-heated cells.