Effect of glass thickness variations on the performance of RPC detectors

The India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) is planning to build a magnetized iron calorimeter detector (ICAL) in which Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) will be the active detector elements. A study of the performance of RPCs, made using electrodes of various thicknesses, is pivotal in optimizing the design parameters of the ICAL RPCs. We fabricated RPCs with glasses of various thicknesses and studied their performance in the same environmental conditions. A study of detector efficiency, noise rate, time resolution and charge distribution is presented in this paper.