Design and development of portable RPC-based Cosmic Muon Tracker

Abstract Primary cosmic rays when interact with the atmosphere, produce a cascade of lighter secondary particles namely pion, kaon, neutrons, muons, electrons, positrons and neutrinos. Muons are one of the most abundant and easily detectable particles at the ground surface using a large variety of particle detectors. Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) of 2 m× 2 m in dimension were developed to be used in large scale as the active detector elements in the Iron Calorimeter (ICAL) which was planned to be built by the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO). As a spin-off of this work, a portable stack of eight 26 cm×26 cm RPC detectors was developed, named the Cosmic Muon Tracker (CMT). It could be used to conduct small-scale particle detector experiments as well as training Students. We will discuss design, integration, characterization and some of the applications of this detector in this paper.