The Micromegas Project for the ATLAS Upgrade

Micromegas is one of the detector technologies (along with the small Thin Gap Chambers) that has been chosen for precision tracking and triggering purposes of the ATLAS muon forward detectors in the view of LHC luminosity increase. To fulfill the requirements of such an upgrade, several micromegas prototype detectors were tested in recent test beam campaigns with high energy hadron beams at CERN. Performance studies and results on spatial resolution for perpendicular and inclined tracks, efficiency, as well as detector performance and comparison to simulation in a magnetic field are presented. Moreover, an overview of detector performance after neutron, X-ray, gammas and alphas exposure and as well as construction achievements of large area micromegas detectors are presented.