A Gas Monitoring Chamber for the ATLAS Muon Monitored Drift Tube(MDT) System

The ATLAS Muon Spectrometer incorporates MDT precision chambers used for precise track reconstruction. Since the MDT resolution depends crucially on the electron drift velocity in the operating gas, a monitoring chamber is designed and constructed to precisely monitor the gas properties in real time. This chamber continuously samples the operating gas and measures the electron drift velocity in the operating gas over a wide range of electric field strength with very high resolution and short response time. In order to validate the feasibility and optimize the design, extensive simulations based on Garfield and 3D/2D finite element method(FEM) are done, which include mechanics, electrostatics, thermodynamics and computational fluid dynamics(CFD). This monitoring chamber enables the measurement of the drift velocity spectra over a varying electric field with a wide range, then very small changes and contaminations of the gas mixture can be detected. Results obtained at CERN and in the lab will be presented as well.