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D20

D20 - Diffractomètre de poudres

Instrument doté d'un flux de neutrons élevé, il fallait un détecteur banane plus rapide que ce qui existait.

Dans les archives des services techniques, une note manuscript de 1983 rapporte que Anton Oed propose une nouvelle technologie (dépôts métalliques sur verre) en passe d'être testée sur un detecteur réel. Le 1er pas de ce qui deviendra les microstrips.

Oed présente les microstrips au "instrument subcommittee" du 28 fev 86
Georges Charpak invité est noté "excusé" mais Peter Geltenbort se souvient qu'il a ensuite dit à Oed que ça ne marcherait jamais. Avec le recul Peter dit que c'est effectivement un petit miracle que Oed ait finalement réussi à franchir toutes les difficultés en 17 ans d'efforts. Le résultat en valait la peine vu le succès de la technologie microstrip (MSPC ou MSGC) largement au delà de la neutronique (rayons X et physique des hautes énergies).

Bruno Guérard, Oct 2022

Most of the MSGC and standard MWPC detectors used at the ILL have been, or will be replaced soon, by the trench-MWPC technique which combines the advantages of both the MSGC and the MWPC.

During the SINE2020 project, we did not succeed in demonstrating the superiority of a MSGC prototype operated in parallel charge division readout (where each anodes is read by charge division). A high amplification gain is required for charge division (a factor 10 higher than individual readout), hence the ion feedback is higher.
We tried to reduce the ion feedback by operating the detector at a lower amplification gain with a new cathode layout we developed but, unfortunately, IMT (the manufacturer of the microstrips) did not succeed anymore in making good MSGCs.
It seems that they have lost their know-how; since the MSGC market is not as attractive as it used to be in the 90s, there are no tangible prospects for IMT in this field.

This is the reason why we decide to replace the D20 detector by a new one instead of just replacing the MSGC plates, which would have been much simpler; we estimated that the risk was too high that IMT doesn’t provide good quality MSGCs, or decide to stop producing them. There was also the issue of the Shott S8900 glass fabrication (only one manufacturer in the world).

I think that it is better to say that MSGC are no longer of actuality, but they have been at the origin of a development which is still very active in different application fields.

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Dernière mise à jour: 22 October 2022