MCP-PMT Development at Argonne National Laboratory

Microchannel plate photomultipliers (MCP-PMTs) have compact electron amplification design, providing them with excellent magnetic field immunity and precision timing performance. Groups at Argonne have been developing MCP-PMTs by applying low-cost MCPs functionalized by the atomic layer deposition technique. Recently, we demonstrated a low-cost whole glass MCP-PMT package design, achieving 3×3 mm² pixel readout, magnetic field tolerance of over 1.5 Tesla, root-mean-square (RMS) time resolution of 89 ps and transit time spread (TTS) time resolution of 35 ps, fulfilling the critical photodetector requirement for EIC Cherenkov imaging detectors. However, there are two limitations of the current Argonne-fabricated MCP-PMTs: activation area of only 6 × 6 cm² and quantum efficiency (QE) of 10% limited by the fabrication facility. A 10 × 10 cm² MCP-PMT fabrication facility was thus designed and constructed to overcome these limitations, and provide with a practical device size prototypes to the Nuclear Physics community. The design of the fabrication facility, its construction and commissioning progress will be reported. The future performance enhancement developments and possible applications which benefit from the existence of such an MCP-PMT fabrication facility will also be discussed.