Industrialization of resistive plate chamber production

Resistive plate chambers (RPCs) with electrodes of high-pressure phenolic laminate and small gas gap widths down to 1 mm provide large area tracking at relatively low cost in combination with high rate capability and fast response with excellent time resolution of better than 500 ps. They are perfectly suited for experiments requiring sub-nanosecond time resolution and spatial resolution on the order of a few millimeters over large areas. Thin-gap RPCs will therefore be used for the upgrade of the barrel muon system of the ATLAS experiment at HL-LHC and are candidates for the instrumentation of future collider detectors and experiments searching for long-lived particles in experiments like ANUBIS. RPCs are also frequently used in large area cosmic ray detectors. The large demand for RPCs exceeds the presently available production capacities. At the same time, the requirements on mechanical precision, reliability and reproducibility for collider detectors have increased, especially with the reduced gas gap widths. Additional suppliers with industry-style quality assurance are therefore urgently needed.