Improvement of time resolution in large area single gap Resistive Plate Chambers

The intrinsic gain of a single gap Resistive Plate Chamber (RPC) is affected by several factors, e.g., variation in the thicknesses of glass electrode, button and side spacer, different composition of gas due to improper flow, leaks in the detector volume, etc. The position dependent gain is one of the dominant components of the time resolution of a large area single gap RPC. Besides, strip multiplicity as well as lateral position of the trajectory of the charged particle in RPC strip also result in variation of timing information. The observation of large signals produced by the charged particles passing close to the button spacers also has some repercussion on the overall timing resolution of an RPC. A new offline correction technique to achieve time resolution below 1 ns is reported in this paper. This technique is validated using an RPC cosmic ray telescope (1×1m2) at TIFR. We also suggest a few alternative solutions to improve the time resolution during the operational phase of the INO-ICAL experiment. The techniques presented here are useful not only for ICAL, but also for any detector deploying RPCs in large scale.