Conductivity and Charge Depletion Aging of Resistive Electrodes for High Rate...

Development of new electrodes is a key element for the improvement of high rateResistive Plate Chambers (RPC). In the particular case of resistive electrodes, the fabrication ofthese elements is a challenging problem from a material science point of view. The combination ofresistivity, permittivity and stability requirements is really hard to satisfy for any known material.Only a few materials have been found to be suitable for fabrication of resistive plates. In this work,we have carried out electrical characterizations of some of the materials that are currently used inRPCs or are solid candidates to be used as resistive plates in high rate RPCs. As a result, we havefound strong evidences that ion conduction processes under moderate to high electric fields are ableto drift high amounts of charge which allow to understand the degradation nature of the involvedprocesses.