No Arabic abstract
Pressurized drift-tube chambers are efficient detectors for high-precision tracking over large areas. The Monitored Drift-Tube (MDT) chambers of the muon spectrometer of the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reach a spatial resolution of 35 micons and almost 100% tracking efficiency with 6 layers of 30 mm diameter drift tubes operated with Ar:CO2 (93:7) gas mixture at 3 bar and a gas gain of 20000. The ATLAS MDT chambers are designed to cope with background counting rates due to neutrons and gamma-rays of up to about 300 kHz per tube which will be exceeded for LHC luminosities larger than the design value of 10-34 per square cm and second. Decreasing the drift-tube diameter to 15 mm while keeping the other parameters, including the gas gain, unchanged reduces the maximum drift time from about 700 ns to 200 ns and the drift-tube occupancy by a factor of 7. New drift-tube chambers for the endcap regions of the ATLAS muon spectrometer have been designed. A prototype chamber consisting of 12 times 8 layers of 15 mm diameter drift tubes of 1 m length has been constructed with a sense wire positioning accuracy of 20 microns. The 15 mm diameter drift-tubes have been tested with cosmic rays in the Gamma Irradiation Facility at CERN at counting rates of up to 1.85 MHz.
The muon detectors of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have to cope with unprecedentedly high neutron and gamma ray background rates. In the forward regions of the muon spectrometer of the ATLAS detector, for instance, counting rates of 1.7 kHz/square cm are reached at the LHC design luminosity. For high-luminosity upgrades of the LHC, up to 10 times higher background rates are expected which require replacement of the muon chambers in the critical detector regions. Tests at the CERN Gamma Irradiation Facility showed that drift-tube detectors with 15 mm diameter aluminum tubes operated with Ar:CO2 (93:7) gas at 3 bar and a maximum drift time of about 200 ns provide efficient and high-resolution muon tracking up to the highest expected rates. For 15 mm tube diameter, space charge effects deteriorating the spatial resolution at high rates are strongly suppressed. The sense wires have to be positioned in the chamber with an accuracy of better than 50 ?micons in order to achieve the desired spatial resolution of a chamber of 50 ?microns up to the highest rates. We report about the design, construction and test of prototype detectors which fulfill these requirements.
The resolution and efficiency of a precision drift-tube chamber for the ATLAS muon spectrometer with final read-out electronics was tested at the Gamma Irradiation Facility at CERN in a 100 GeV muon beam and at photon irradiation rates of up to 990 Hz/square cm which corresponds to twice the highest background rate expected in ATLAS. A silicon strip detector telescope was used as external reference in the beam. The pulse-height measurement of the read-out electronics was used to perform time-slewing corrections which lead to an improvement of the average drift-tube resolution from 104 microns to 82 microns without irradiation and from 128 microns to 108 microns at the maximum expected rate. The measured drift-tube efficiency agrees with the expectation from the dead time of the read-out electronics up to the maximum expected rate.
The HL-LHC phase is designed to increase by an order of magnitude the amount of data to be collected by the LHC experiments. To achieve this goal in a reasonable time scale the instantaneous luminosity would also increase by an order of magnitude up to $6.10^{34} cm^{-2} s^{-1}$ . The region of the forward muon spectrometer ($|{eta}| > 1.6$) is not equipped with RPC stations. The increase of the expected particles rate up to $2 kHz/cm^{2}$ (including a safety factor 3) motivates the installation of RPC chambers to guarantee redundancy with the CSC chambers already present. The actual RPC technology of CMS cannot sustain the expected background level. The new technology that will be chosen should have a high rate capability and provides a good spatial and timing resolution. A new generation of Glass-RPC (GRPC) using low-resistivity (LR) glass is proposed to equip at least the two most far away of the four high ${eta}$ muon stations of CMS. First the design of small size prototypes and studies of their performance in high-rate particles flux is presented. Then the proposed designs for large size chambers and their fast-timing electronic readout are examined and preliminary results are provided.
The High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) will provide the unique opportunity to explore the nature of physics beyond the Standard Model of strong and electroweak interactions. Highly selective first-level triggers are essential for the physics programme of the ATLAS experiment at HL-LHC, where the instantaneous luminosity will exceed the instantaneous LHC Run 1 luminosity by about an order of magnitude. The ATLAS first-level muon trigger rate is dominated by low momentum muons, which are accepted because of the moderate momentum resolution of the RPC and TGC trigger chambers. This limitation can be overcome by exploiting the data of the precision Muon Drift-Tube (MDT) chambers in the first-level trigger decision. This requires continuous fast transfer of the MDT hits to the off-detector trigger logic and fast track reconstruction algorithms. The reduction of the muon trigger rate achievable with the proposed new trigger concept, the performance of a novel fast track reconstruction algorithm, and the first hardware demonstration of the scheme with muon testbeam data taken at the CERN Gamma Irradiation Facility are discussed.
Two generations of a novel detector for high-resolution transmission imaging and spectrometry of fast-neutrons are presented. These devices are based on a hydrogenous fiber scintillator screen and single- or multiple-gated intensified camera systems (ICCD). This detector is designed for energy-selective neutron radiography with nanosecond-pulsed broad-energy (1 - 10 MeV) neutron beams. Utilizing the Time-of-Flight (TOF) method, such a detector is capable of simultaneously capturing several images, each at a different neutron energy (TOF). In addition, a gamma-ray image can also be simultaneously registered, allowing combined neutron/gamma inspection of objects. This permits combining the sensitivity of the fast-neutron resonance method to low-Z elements with that of gamma radiography to high-Z materials.