Sporadic electron jets from cathodes the main breakdown-triggering mechanism in gaseous detectors

We have demonstrated experimentally that the main breakdown-triggering mechanism in most gaseous detectors, including micropattern gaseous detectors, is sporadic electron jets from the cathode surfaces. Depending on the counting rate and applied voltages, each jet contains randomly from a few primary electrons up to 10⁵, emitted in a time interval ranging between 0.1 μs to milliseconds. After the emission, these primary electrons experience a full gas multiplication in the detector and create spurious pulses. The rate of these jets increases with applied voltage and very sharply at voltages close to the breakdown limit. In our measurements, we found that these jets are responsible for the breakdown-triggering at any counting rate between 10^-2 Hz/mm² and 10⁸ Hz/mm². We demonstrated on a few detectors that an optimized cathode-geometry, a high electrode surface quality, and a proper choice of the gas mixture considerably improve the performance characteristics and provide the highest possible gains. Results from this work were helpful in the construction of high-performance gaseous detectors for medical imaging applications.