Development of Advanced Gaseous Detectors for Muon Tracking and Triggering in Collider Experiments

High luminosity and high energy collider experiments impose big challenges to conventional gaseous detectors used for muon tracking and triggering. Stringent requirements, in terms of time and spatial resolutions, rate capabilities etc. are expected. In the context of ATLAS muon upgrade project, we present extensive researches and developments of advanced gas detectors for precision muon tracking and triggering in high rate environments. Particularly, this dissertation focuses on the studies of Micro-mesh Gaseous structure (Micromegas), thin gap Resistive Plate Chamber (RPC) and small strip Thin Gap multi-wire Chambers (sTGC). In this dissertation, we first present a novel method, based on thermally bonding micro-meshes to anodes, to construct Micromegas detectors. Without employing the traditional photo-lithography process, it is a convenient alternative to build Micromegas. Both experimental and simulation studies of basic performance parameters of thermo-bonded Micromegas will be reported. Development of a new spark-tolerant resistive Micromegas and a fast timing parallel ionization multiplier will be introduced. Studies on precision tracking and fast triggering based on $\sim$ 1 mm thick thin gap RPCs are reported in the second part. Several beam tests are carried out to explore the timing performance, both on-line and off-line spatial resolutions of thin gap RPCs. Results show that (sub-ns $\times$ sub-mm $\times$ cm) logic cells could be realized with thin gap RPCs. High granularity in space and time will be very powerful to remove backgrounds and the precision on-line tracking capability will be precious to improve high momentum muon selectivity. Rate capability measurements of Bakelite RPCs are performed and results show that RPCs with thin gap design could be fully efficient to muons at greater than 15 kHz/cm$^2$ detected rate. Simulation studies of the characteristics and performance of ATLAS New Small Wheel (NSW) primary trigger detector-sTGC will be reported in the last part. The timing performance study suggests that sTGC is capable to perform LHC bunch crossing identification in Small Wheel environment. An analytical model is built to describe the charge sharing among sTGC readout strips and understand the required spatial resolution of $\mathcal{O}$(100) $\mu$m for the ATLAS NSW upgrade.