A large-area glass-resistive plate chamber with multistrip readout

A completely new configuration of a glass resistive-plate chamber (GRPC) was built and tested. It consists of a double two-gap structure of electrodes with an active area of about 400cm2 and is read out via a central multistrip printed circuit board. In measurements with a 60Co source and p, d particles of 1.5AGeV time resolutions better than 80ps, position resolution along the strips of 5–6mm and efficiencies larger than 95% were obtained using available fast standard electronics. These results open the possibility of constructing compact TOF detectors of high resolution and high granularity.