Resistive Plate Chambers with Gd-coated electrodes as thermal neutron detectors

Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) are wide spread, cheap, easy-to-build and large size detectors, used mainly to reveal ionising particles in high-energy physics experiments. Here a technique, consisting in coating the inner surface of the bakelite electrodes with a mixture of linseed oil and Gd2O3 is reported. This allows to make RPCs sensitive also to thermal neutrons, making them suitable to be employed for industrial, medical or de-mining applications. Thermal neutron-sensitive RPCs can be operated at atmospheric pressure, are lightweighted, have low gamma-ray sensitivity and are easy to handle even when large areas have to be covered. This paper reports the results of the first test of this detector, performed at the Geel Linear Accelerator (GELINA) in Belgium.