sTGC Testing for ATLAS’ New Small Wheel at McGill University and CERN

ATLAS’ muon small wheel must be replaced to improve muon track reconstruction and the forward muon trigger as the LHC tends towards higher collision rates. New multi – wire proportional chambers, small strip thin gap chambers (sTGCs), are being created in five countries for the new small wheel [1]. In Canada, the final stage of STGC production is to test the chambers with cosmic muons at McGill University [2]. The laboratory infrastructure at McGill is almost ready to allow data collection from the sTGCs without an operator present, the final step being to complete a temperature control and monitoring infrastructure for the electronic readout boards of the sTGCs. After the chambers are tested at McGill, they are sent to CERN where they are further tested with muon beam from the Super Proton Synchrotron. Preliminary results on the efficiency of one of the prototype chambers are presented. This report gives an overview of sTGC testing for the muon new small wheel with a focus on work completed by the author as part of the Institute of Particle Physics (Canada) Fellowship and CERN Summer Student Programme from May – August, 2018.