A New Approach to High Rate, High Accuracy Gaseous Detectors

An unusual avalanche propagation mechanism has been investigated, mainly mediated by ultra-violet photons, that permits a multistage amplification of ionization electrons. Operation of a multistep gated avalanche chamber is described, that allows to operate in particle fluxes orders of magnitude larger than conventional multiwire proportional chambers. Single photoelectron detection has been achieved, opening the possibility of ¿erenkov light imaging for particles identification. Other applications are foreseen in radio-chromatography, slow neutron and x-ray localization.