A Comparative Study of Straight-Strip and Zigzag-Interleaved Anode Patterns for MPGD Readouts

Due to their simplicity and versatility of design, straight strip or rectangular pad anode structures are frequently used with micropattern gas detectors (MPGDs) to reconstruct high-precision space points for various tracking applications. The particle impact point is typically determined by interpolating the charge collected by several neighboring strips. However, to effectively extract the inherent positional information, the lateral spacing of the straight strips must be comparable to or preferably smaller than the full extent of the incident charge cloud. In contrast, highly interleaved anode patterns, such as zigzags, can adequately sample the incident charge with a pitch appreciably larger than the charge cloud. This has the considerable advantage of providing the same performance while requiring far fewer instrumented channels. Additionally, the geometric parameters defining such zigzag structures may be tuned to provide a near-uniform detector response along and perpendicular to the sensitive coordinate, without the need for so-called 'pad response functions,' while simultaneously maintaining excellent position resolution. We have measured the position resolution of a variety of zigzag-shaped anode patterns optimized for various MPGDs, including gas electron multiplyer (GEM), Micromegas, and micro-resistive-well (μ RWELL) and compared this performance with the same detectors equipped with straight strips of varying pitch. We report on the performance results of each readout structure, evaluated under identical conditions in a test beam.