Speaker
Description
The RPC R&D effort of the last decades is culminating in the HL-LHC upgrades of the ATLAS and CMS systems and in the installation of pilot detectors for large Long-Lived Particle (LLP) experiments. In parallel, the need to drastically reduce the use of fluorinated gases has driven RPC research toward previously unexplored operating conditions, leading to promising results combining improved detector performance with reduced Global Warming Potential (GWP).
At the same time, the rapid progress toward future CERN colliders is stimulating a reassessment of the detector requirements. Although the expected particle rates at FCC-ee are relatively moderate, stringent demands are placed on timing performance, 3D tracking, bunch-crossing identification, fake-muon rejection, particle-flow calorimetry and searches for Beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics.
These developments provide the opportunity to revisit the detector physics governing RPC performance. The present study is based on a quantitative analysis of the primary-cluster statistics together with the concept of effective useful gas gap, showing that the detector efficiency is governed not only by the primary-ionization statistics but also by the interplay between gas mixture, avalanche development and front-end electronics. This framework demonstrates that modern ultra-low-noise electronics can substantially recover the efficiency loss expected from high-CO₂ low-GWP gas mixtures, providing a quantitative basis for the optimization of RPCs for future collider experiments.
Finally, to address the more demanding timing and rate requirements of FCC-ee time-of-flight applications, calorimetry and FCC-hh, a comparative study between MPGD-based and RPC-based hybrid photosensitive detectors will be presented. The discussion will show how RPC-based hybrid photosensitive detectors may offer intrinsic advantages when addressing the scalability challenge, which is expected to become the key discriminator among competing detector technologies for future collider experiments.