Performance studies of the ATLAS transition radiation tracker barrel using SR1 cosmics data

The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to measure Nature at the energy scale often associated with electroweak symmetry breaking. When it comes online in 2008, the LHC and ATLAS will work to discover, among other things, the Higgs boson and any other signatures for physics beyond the Standard Model. As part of the ATLAS Inner Detector, the Transition Radiation Tracker will be an important part of ATLAS’s ability to make precise measurements of particle properties. This paper summarizes work done to study and categorize the performance of the TRT, using a combination of cosmic ray test data from the SR1 facility and Monte Carlo. In general, it was found that the TRT is working well, with module-level efficiencies around 90 % and module-level noise just above 2 %. Reasonably good agreement was observed with Monte Carlo, though there are some apparently pathological differences between the two that deserve further attention.