ATLAS Transition Radiation Tracker (TRT): Straw Tubes for Tracking and Particle Identification at the Large Hadron Collider

The ATLAS Transition Radiation Tracker (TRT) is the outermost of the three inner detector tracking subsystems and consists of 300000 thin-walled drift tubes (“straw tubes”) that are 4 mm in diameter. The TRT system provides 30 space points with 130 micron resolution for charged tracks with |η| < 2 and pT > 0.5 GeV/c. The TRT also provides electron identification capability by detecting transition radiation (TR) X-ray photons in a Xe-based working gas mixture. Compared to Run 1, the LHC beams now provide a higher center of mass energy (13 TeV), more bunches with a reduced spacing (25 ns), and more particles in each bunch leading to very challenging, higher occupancies in the TRT. We will present TRT modifications made for Run 2 for in areas: to improve response to the expected much higher rate of hits and to mitigate leaks of the Xe-based active gas mixture. The higher rates required changes to the data acquisition system and introduction of validity gate to reject out-of-time hits. Radiation-induced gain changes in the front-end electronics was studied. Many gas leaks were repaired and the gas system was modified to use a cheaper Ar-based gas mixture (or even a Kr-based mixture which is under study) in some channels. A likelihood method was introduced to optimize the TRT electron identification.