On aging problem of glass Resistive Plate Chambers

Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) were chosen to be the active elements for a 50kton neutrino detector, which is proposed to be built by the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) collaboration. As part of the detector R&D programme, we have built a large number of prototype RPCs and studied their characteristics. While, the results obtained by us are in agreement with those reported in the literature, the RPCs were observed to suffer severe damage when operated continuously for a few months. We summarise here our studies on this problem.