Beyond the RICH: innovative photosensitive geseous detectors for new fields of applications

We have developed and successfully used several innovative designs of detectors with solid photocathodes. The main advantage of these detectors is that rather high gains (>10^4) can be achieved in a single multiplication step. This is possible by, for instance, exploiting the secondary electron multiplication and limiting the energy of the steamers by distributed resistivity. The single step approach also allows a very good position resolution to be achieved in some devices: 50 mu m “on line” without applying any treatment method (like “center of gravity”). The main focus of our report is new fields of applications for these detectors and the optimization of their designs for such purposes.