High irradiation and ageing properties of resistive Micromegas detectors at the new CERN Gamma Irradiation Facility

Resistive Micromegas have been developed in recent years with the aim of making this technology usable in HEP experiments where the high sparking rate of classical Micromegas is not tolerable. A resistive Micromegas with four layers and an active surface of 0.5 m2 each, has been designed and built at CERN as prototype of the detectors to be used for the upgrade of the ATLAS experiment. The detector has been exposed to an intense gamma source of 16 TBq in order to study the effects of ageing and evaluate the detector behavior under high irradiation.