Performance of rate capability for glass RPC operated in streamer mode with nitrogen laser beam

Resistive plate chamber (RPC) has attracted high-energy and cosmic-ray experiment since its introduction in early 1980's because of high efficiency, good time resolution, tracking capability and low cost. From these features, RPCs have been chosen as the muon detector for Belle experiment at KEK. The RPCs have two operation mode; avalanche and streamer mode. The avalanche mode has an advantage that it offers in terms of rate capability to compare with the streamer mode. But, the streamer mode is still preferred for high-energy experiment, mainly for its characteristics of giving large and saturated signal that makes the front-end electronics simple and the experiment operation easy. From this point of view, we have to study the rate capability of the streamer for a glass RPC with nitrogen laser beam. Furthermore, we are going to study the fundamental gas properties of streamer, drift velocity, diffusion, and electron attachment in the glass RPC. In this conference, we report the preliminary results of the rate capability of the glass RPC operated in streamer mode with nitrogen laser beam. The results provide us more knowledge of the rate capability for the streamer mode operation.