Learning about Microchannel Plates (MCPs)

thorleif

Hi,

I'm a student working at CERN. Currently I am to learn about the function and operation of microchannel plates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microch...plate_detector), therefore I am wondering if anyone has a good tip on where in the litterature I can read up on them?

Best,
Olof

yungman

We used a lot of microchannel plates before. It is almost like a whole lot of electron multipliers together that amplify electrons. As you can see in the the link you provided, the channels are slanted so if an electron come in straight, it start bouncing inside the channel as it penetrates the channelplates. Every time it hit the channel wall, more electrons stripped out and continue traveling down the channel. So the next bounce on the wall, you have more electrons hitting and more secondary electrons produced. So at the end of the channel, there are a whole lot of electrons coming out. That's how the electrons got amplified.

Also the two plates with one that has channels slanting up and the other slanting back down. So when an electron hit at one particular location, the bundle of electrons after amplification comes out at exactly the same position on the other side. There are a lot of these little channels covering the surface of the plate, so any electron hit on the surface, the two channel plates will produce amplified electrons on the other side of the plate in the exact position. With this, you can form an image of the electron arrival. We used this mainly for imagining in many of our mass spectrometer.

For pulse counting, then you just ac couple from the HV feed of the back plate. I never try to understand the physics of it, if you are a user, I don't think you need to go too much beyond this.

thorleif

Great! Thanks for helping out. It would be awesome to have something to read about it, more in depth if available. Can you think of a book or publication?
Forming an image of an electron (or positron) beam is very interesting to us.

M Quack

Nuclear Instruments and Methods

Volume 162, Issues 1–3, 1–15 June 1979, Pages 587–601

Microchannel plate detectors

Joseph Ladislas Wiza

Galileo Electro-Optics Corporation, Sturbridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.


http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0029-554X(79)90734-1,