Test of large area glass RPCs at the DA Phi NE Test Beam Facility (BTF)

The CaPiRe program has been started to develop a new detector design, in order to produce large areas of glass Resistive Plate Chambers (RPC) detectors, overcoming the previous limitations. As a first step we produced our glass RPC detectors (1 m(2)) at General Tecnica exploiting their standard procedures, materials and production techniques simply using 2 mm glass electrodes instead of the bakelite ones. A set of RPC was produced by using pre-coated (silk screen printed) electrodes, while others were produced with the standard graphite coating. All the detectors, together with four old Glass RPC acting as reference, were tested at the DAPhiNE Test Beam Facility with 500 MeV electrons in order to study the efficiency in different positions inside the detectors (i.e. near spacers and edges) and to study the detector behavior as a function of the local particle rate. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.