Development of a gating grid driver of TPC for exotic beam experiments

The Multi-purpose Time Projection Chamber (TPC) for nuclear AsTrophysical and Exotic beam experiments (MATE) is being upgraded for the decay and active target experiments at the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL). We have developed a gating grid driver to control the transitions between the closed and open states of the gating grid of the MATE-TPC to detect interesting rare decay events from a large amount of implanted ions. The gating grid driver is mainly composed of a digital control unit and a high-voltage switch unit. The digital control unit responds to the external trigger and generates control signals for the operation of the high-voltage control part based on the presetting instruction. The high-voltage switch unit is connected to two negative high voltages with different values and changes the voltages of neighboring wires of the gating grid based on the request for closing or opening the gate. A 500 ns switching time of the gating grid driver has been achieved from the closed to open state. The duration of the open state can be adjusted from 1 µs to 99 ms based on the experimental requirements. This gating grid driver can be used in a particle detector with a high voltage bias of up to ± 3000 V.