Calibration Studies of the Front-End Electronics for the ATLAS New Small Wheel Project

To continue to probe new avenues of physics, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will see a series of upgrades starting in 2019 that will see the luminosity surpass the design specifications. The increased data intake will quickly exceed the capabilities of the current data-acquisition systems of the ATLAS experiment. Therefore, several sub-systems of ATLAS will also undergo a number of upgrades in parallel with the LHC. One of these areas is the New Small Wheel project, which forms one sub-system of the muon detectors. The current detector technology will be replaced with small-strip thin gap chambers (sTGCs) and micro-mesh gaseous detectors (micromegas). This thesis will highlight McGill's role in testing the individual sTGC detectors. Specifically, much of the work presented relates to the preparation of specially designed boards and integrated circuits used in data-acquisition. During this process, both the analog and digital baselines are measured along with any faulty or erratic channels. In doing so, a custom algorithm is developed in order to calculate the pedestal for each readout channel. The results of these scripts are then implemented in a much larger cosmic ray analysis software application that then determines the efficiency of the detector among other metrics of performance.