Improvement of Time and Position Resolution in Single Gap RPC

The 2 m  \(\times \)  2 m single gap Resistive Plate Chambers(RPCs) are used as the active detector elements in the mini-Iron Calorimeter(miniICAL) detector at IICHEP, Madurai. Single Gap RPCs are known to provide a time resolution on the order of \(\sim \) 1 ns. The position resolution is mainly dependent on the strip width. In miniICAL RPCs the strip width is \(\sim \) 3 cm, which provides a position resolution of \(\sim \) 1 cm. This detector is designed to operate in a magnetic field with a maximum field of 1.5 T for charge and momentum measurement of muons at the earth’s surface. Even a small improvement in the position and time resolution will help to improve the momentum and directionality measurements of muons and eventually propagated this result to final ICAL experiment at underground facility. The width of the discriminated pulse from the front-end amplifier is proportional to the time over threshold(ToT) of the RPC pulse. This information is used to correct the time-walk in the signal due to varying pulse heights. The intrinsic time resolutions of RPCs are improved from \(\sim \) 0.77–0.98 ns to \(\sim \) 0.57–0.66 ns. The ToT as well as the time difference between successive strips is used to improve the position resolution also. Improvement of time and position resolution of large scale single gap RPC along with other various issues like the effect of the terminator resistor will be presented.