Conductivity and charge depletion aging of resistive electrodes for high rate RPCs

Development of new electrodes is the key element for the improvement of the high rate Resistive Plate Chambers (RPC). In the particular case of resistive electrodes, the fabrication of these devices is a challenging problem from a material science point of view. The combination of resistivity, permittivity and stability requirements is really hard to satisfy for any known material. Respecting this, several materials have been found to be suitable for fabrication of resistive plates. In this work, we have carried out electrical characterizations of some of these materials that are currently used in RPCs or are solid candidates to be used as resistive plates for high rate RPCs. As a result, we have found strong evidences that ion conduction processes under moderate to high electric fields are able to drift high amounts of charge which are crucial to understand the degradation nature of the involved processes.