Eco-Friendly Gas Mixtures in Resistive Plate Chambers
Summary
Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) are widely used in high-energy physics for muon detection and timing applications owing to their excellent time resolution, high efficiency and relatively low cost. Traditional RPC gas mixtures rely heavily on fluorinated compounds such as tetrafluoroethane (R134a) and sulphur hexafluoride (SF₆), both of which possess high global warming potentials and face increasingly stringent environmental regulations. In response, the community has pursued eco-friendly alternatives based on tetrafluoropropene isomers, carbon dioxide and novel quenchers. Recent efforts have focused on validating these mixtures under realistic high-rate and high-radiation conditions, assessing long-term ageing effects, and modelling electron transport to optimise detector performance. Success in this area promises not only to reduce the carbon footprint of existing collider experiments but also to inform the design of future facilities and to demonstrate sustainable practices in large-scale gaseous detector systems.
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Eco-Friendly Gas Mixtures in Resistive Plate Chambers publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in eco-friendly gas mixtures in resistive plate chambers across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Resistive Plate Chamber (RPC): A gaseous particle detector using resistive electrodes to generate and collect avalanches induced by ionising radiation.
Global Warming Potential (GWP): A relative measure of how much heat a greenhouse gas traps in the atmosphere over a specified time period compared with carbon dioxide.
Avalanche mode: A regime of gaseous detector operation where ionisation electrons multiply continuously under a strong electric field, producing a detectable signal without full discharge.
Streamer: A localised discharge occurring when an avalanche grows sufficiently large, potentially leading to high charge deposition and signal distortion.
Quench gas: A secondary gas component added to a mixture to absorb ultraviolet photons and stabilise electron avalanches, preventing uncontrolled discharges.
References
- High-rate tests on resistive plate chambers operated with eco-friendly gas mixtures. European Physical Journal C (2024).
- Studies on RPC detectors operated with environmentally friendly gas mixtures in LHC-like conditions. The European Physical Journal Plus (2023).
- Long-Term Ageing Studies on Eco-Friendly Resistive Plate Chamber Detectors. Particles (2025).
- MATOQ: a Monte Carlo simulation of electron transport in environmental-friendly gas mixtures for Resistive Plate Chambers. The European Physical Journal Plus (2023).
- Performance of thin-RPC detectors for high rate applications with eco-friendly gas mixtures. European Physical Journal C (2024).
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