Study of long-term sustained operation of gaseous detectors for the high rate environment in CMS

The muon system of CMS aims to provide an efficient and fast identification of the muons produced in the proton-proton collisions. However, the forward region of the end-caps is only instrumented with Cathode Strip Chambers. This lack of redundancy will be problematic after the high-luminosity upgrade of the LHC (HL-LHC), for which the increase of the background rate would degrade the Level-1 trigger performance and thus the selection of interesting physics channels. The goal of the CMS muon upgrade is to maintain the L1 trigger rate with maximum selection efficiency in order to fully exploit the HL-LHC. The CMS GEM Collaboration has proposed to instrument the vacant high-eta region of the muon end-caps with Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) detectors, called GE1/1 chambers. The Ph.D. subject proposed by the CMS GEM Collaboration aims to demonstrate that the GE1/1 technology is the most suitable choice for the upgrade of the muon end-caps. Three main research projects were conducted in this context. The first project included the precise measurement of the fundamental characteristics and the detection performance of the triple-GEM detectors produced with the single-mask technique. Those characteristics are essential to ensure that the detectors can operate in the forward region of CMS. The second project was focused on the long-term operation of GE1/1 detectors, in particular the study of the aging phenomenon, which includes all the processes that lead to a significant and permanent degradation of the performance of the detectors. Several aging tests were performed at the CERN irradiation facilities to prove that the GE1/1 chambers can operate during at least 10 years at HL-LHC without suffering from performance losses. The excellent properties measured during the R&D phase led to the approval of the GE1/1 project by the CMS Collaboration. The third project, conducted in the framework of the mass production, consisted of developing of the main steps of the Quality Control of the GE1/1 chambers.