Microchannel plates (MCP) are essential for high gain imaging and detection applications in science, medicine, and industry. They have superior temporal resolution for incident charged and UV/x-ray particles, operate in high magnetic fields, and are essential for many particle detection applications in scientific instrumentation, such as scintillating fiber particle trackers. However, most existing MCP are fabricated from activated glass and suffer from a gain that falls rapidly with the cumulative charge per area collected from the MCP. Furthermore, MCP are expensive, available in limited areas, have significant spatial non-uniformities, and radiation damage readily. We propose to overcome many of these difficulties by using anodized aluminum plates as the basis of an MCP. When formed under controlled anodization, amorphous alumina contains open, densely packed, straight micropores, oriented perpendicular to the surface, with a length to diameter ratio appropriate for microchannel gain. Pure alumina has a sufficient secondary emission gain so that the pores can serve as gain channels, without activation, or contaminating materials. We anticipate that this ceramic material will have superior stability and lifetime properties to those of glass MCP, at very low cost, with the potential of large MCP areas. The microporous MCP matrix could result in much better spatial resolution and spatial uniformity than existing MCP, with high radiation resistance. The gain stability and long life will enable the fast, compact MCP technology to be used much more widely in a large variety of vacuum electronics amplification applications. In Phase I, we propose to fabricate prototype amorphous alumina MCP's by anodization, and measure gain, gain stability and spatial properties. If successful, micro/nanochannel plates (M/NCP) with a much longer operational life compared with current MCP would result, and could enable ultrafast, gated, compact, high magnetic field, radiation-hard MCP photomultipliers (PMT); (2) long lived image intensifiers/ converters with sub-micron spatial resolution; (3) flat panel vacuum phospher displays; (4) imaging charged particle/x-ray detectors with high gain and sub-micron spatial resolution.
