A low-threshold discriminator for resistive-plate chambers

A low-threshold amplifier-discriminator (AD) is intended for reading information from resistiveplate chambers (RPCs) and consists of a preamplifier and discriminator. The minimum operation threshold of the device is 60 muV at an input impedance of 25 Omega, which corresponds to a charge of 0.12 pC induced on a strip. The AD time jitter is below 0.6 ns over an input signals range of (2-20)U//t//h //r. The preamplifier noise referred to the input is less than 25 muV (rms). The AD was developed for testing RPCs for the ATLAS (CERN) experiment.