Exploitable results Development of substrates suitable for use in radiation-hard microstrip gas counters Microstrip Gas Counters (MSGC) are devices capable of locating the passage of ionizing particles with high accuracy. This detector finds applications in High Energy Physics, Atomic Physics, Astrophysics and Medical Imaging. The counter collects and amplificates the electrons liberated in a suitable gas by passing particle. Today the main limitation in the application of the MSGC is the radiation hardness of the device. This depends critically on the properties of the substrates and materials used in the counter. The project has opened the possibility for 3 institutes, located in Moscow, to work in contact with Russian industry to construct a radiation hard MSGC. The ULB in Brussels and NIKHEF in Amsterdam have made available facilities for assembling and testing the resulting devices. One of the proposed solutions is the coating of borosilicate glass by the thin layer of a semiconductive glass or polydiamond. The plasma assisted chemical vacuum deposition of the polydiamond layer and ion-beam sputtering of the semiconductive glass have been implemented to get a surface resistivity in the range of 1014 - 1015 Ohm/square. The MSGC fabricated on such a substrate works stable at the irradiation current up to 10 nA/mm2. But even a bare glass substrate demonstrates stable operation at the current 1 nA/mm2, when the drift current is 2-3 times higher than the cathode. Long term stability of MSGC on bare glass can be improved using nickel or gold strips instead of aluminium. The significant improvement was achieved for a coated substrate which is therefore more expensive. The MSGC on the coated borosilicate glass can sustain irradiation dose equivalent to 10 Mrad and does not suffer from neutrons and heavily ionizing particles. The gas gain for the coated substrates is 2-3 times less than for the bare glass but even at the gas gain ~2000 the efficiency 97% was obtained using custome readout electronics. The obtained results allow us to build a vital detector able to sustain the high irradiation which is foreseen in the new accelerator in CERN (LHC) as well as in the high rate applications in medicine and biology. Searching for OpenAIRE data... There was an error trying to search data from OpenAIRE No results available
