We are currently developing and studying the performance of glass RPC prototypes, under the INO detector R & D programme. While we were successful in building and characterising a large number of chambers using local glass, these have met with severe aging problems after a few months of continuous operation. We have then built a couple of RPCs using a Japanese glass. We report in this paper on our long term stability tests of these RPCs. We also present some of our recent results on tracking of cosmic ray muons in a stack of glass RPCs.

An overview of the experimental result on simultaneous measurement of pre-scission neutron, proton, 𝛼-particle and GDR 𝛾-ray multiplicities for the reaction ²⁸Si+¹⁷⁵Lu at 159 MeV using the BARC–TIFR Pelletron–LINAC accelerator facility is given. The data were analysed using deformation-dependent particle transmission coefficients, binding energies and level densities which are incorporated in the code JOANNE2 to extract fission time-scales and mean deformation of the saddle-to-scission emitter. The neutron, light charged particle and GDR 𝛾-ray multiplicity data could be explained consistently. The emission of neutrons seems to be favoured towards larger deformation as compared to charged particles. The pre-saddle time-scale is deduced as (0–2) × 10⁻²¹ s whereas the saddle-to-scission time-scale is (36–39) × 10⁻²¹ s. The total fission time-scale is deduced as (36–41) × 10⁻²¹ s.