Simulation, Fabrication, and Testing of a Position-Sensitive Proportional Gas Chamber with Equipotential Parallel Wires with Similar Behavior as Micromegas Detectors

Different strategies exist for electron multiplication in a proportional radiation gas detector. In this work, the amplification region is formed by an array of equipotential stainless steel wires that were fixed at equal distance from a bared silver flat ribbon cable as the anode of the detector. The wires in this structure have the same role as the micromesh in Micro-Mesh Gaseous (Micromegas) detectors. Its fabrication method is simple and low cost. In this work, the amplification gain of the fabricated sample at different anode voltages was extracted, and the maximum achievable gain without electric discharge was measured to be M = 315 at 700 V. The proposed detector has an inherently two-dimensional positioning capacity, and the position sensitivity of the detector in one dimension was tested, the results of which show a good discrepancy with theoretical expectation. For the fabricated detector, the maximum number of charges before electric discharge was extracted (1 × 10⁷) and compared with the best-designed Micromegas detector (6 × 10⁷). These results clearly show that the proposed detector, despite its simplicity and cost-effective process, has a reasonable quality in comparison to the Micromegas detector.