Studying discharges in the Gas Electron Multiplies in Alice Detector

Characterizing discharges is very important in the operation of the GEM detector. Once the discharges happen, a current will go through the GEM, the voltages across the GEM foils sides drop, charge amplification cannot take place anymore, resulting in a loss of signal. So the goal is to understand how the discharges evolve and propagate, in order to find requirements on the voltage settings, which allow to decrease the discharge probability.