INCOM, INC. — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: 30a

Description

We propose to address DoE NP needs for low cost large area Multi-channel Plate (MCP) type light sensors with high spatial resolution, high rate capability, radiation tolerance, magnetic field tolerance, and timing resolution of <10 picoseconds for time-of-flight detectors- Our target application is Time-of- Flight and Cherenkov light sensors within the Particle IDentification systems of DoE NP’s planned Electron Ion Collider (EIC) Detectors- MCP light sensors are the only available technology that can measure particle velocities with low noise and accuracy sufficient to time light travelling across just one third of a millimeter (to determine particle identities and to thereby uncover the physics of the interior of the nucleus), but they will have to operate in strong magnetic fields (needed for curving particle tracks to measure particle momentum) at the EIC- Incom’s Large-Area Picosecond Photon Sensors (LAPPDs) are by far the most cost-effective MCP photosensors, capable of covering many square meters of sensing area by tiling 20 x 20cm devices and minimal electronics channels, but they are at present too sensitive to magnetic fields- We propose to improve the performance of LAPPDs in magnetic fields by decreasing the feature sizes in our MCPs to just a few thousandths of a millimeter, a factor of 4 less than for current devices, and to modify the device internal geometry; both methods have been shown to be necessary and sufficient for providing sufficient magnetic insensitivity within smaller-scale MCP photosensors- Our research strategy will be to produce MCPs with more than an order of magnitude larger area than for presently available devices, through transformative cost-effective MCP manufacturing methods we have developed at Incom-