The Resistive Plated Chamber was invented in the early 1980s. Many investigations and improvements have taken place since then. Nowadays, it is widely used in the large scale high energy physics experiments, such as the ATLAS, CMS and ALICE of the LHC. In the RPC detectors, the resistive plates quenches the discharge effectively and the planar geometry ensures the good timing performance. These advantages, together with the low cost of gaseous detectors, make the RPCs especially suitable for large-area detector systems. RPC/MRPC can be used to build the muon system or the Time-of-Flight system with their good spatial resolution and excellent time resolution. After special modifications, it can be used in more specific applications, like the positron emission tomography (PET), homeland security, flame detection, and so on.

In this talk, the working principle of RPCs will be introduced. Based on the current R&D efforts carried out for the up-to-date requirements from the modern experiments, the possible methods to improve the performances will also be discussed.

Yongjie Sun, associate professor, got his PhD in University of Science and Technology of China in 2006. He focuses on the development of new gaseous detectors from then. He has finished the design and construction of MRPC detectors for several experiments, e.g., the TOF system for STAR experiment, the Muon Telescope Detector (MTD) for STAR and the End-cap TOF system for BES-III. The current activities include the R&D on MRPC for CBM-TOF and the thin-gap RPC for the Phase-II upgrade for ATLAS.