Development of lownoise, highgain microchannel plate

To reduce the noise and increase the electron gain of microchannel plate (MCP) is one of the best solutions to improve the signaltonoise ratio, FOV definition and brightness gain for image intensifiers. The high performance MCP was fabricated by adopting the clad glass which has high and stable secondary emission coefficient, the core glass which matches the thermal physical property of the clad glass, but its etch rate is 4 orders greater than that of clad glass, and the border glass which matches the clad glass and core glass in the whole manufacture process. The MCP fabricated with this optimized technique shows better performance, its dark current density is less than 5×10-13A/cm2，its fixed pattern noise and scintillating noise are significantly reduced. After it is scrubbed by electrons of 40μAh, its electron gain（800V）is greater than 500 in vacuum system. The experiment results indicate it meets the expectation.