Study of Muon Drift Tube Detectors and Fast Readout Electronics for Very High Counting Rates

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Particle Physics, CERN, collides protons and lead ions with high luminosities at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV in the center of four detectors, of which one is the ATLAS experiment. After more than a decade of successful operation with the discovery of the Higgs boson, the instantaneous luminosity will be increased by almost an order of magnitude with the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) in order to perform precision measurements of the Higgs boson and top quark and extend the searches for physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. A proposal for a further major increase of the collision energy and luminosities is the Future Circular Collider (FCC). In order to cope with the increased particle fluxes, upgrades of the LHC experiments and the development of new detector technologies are needed. In this thesis, studies of the potential of small-diameter Muon Drift Tube (sMDT) chambers for precise track reconstruction at high particle fluxes and concepts of new readout electronics are presented. Twelve new sMDT chambers for the ATLAS Muon Spectrometer have already been constructed, tested and installed in ATLAS in order to gain experience and to optimize them for future applications. New read-out electronics concepts with improved signal shaping, which allow for he full exploitation of the sMDT rate capability have been studied. Measurements with generated pulses and on sMDT chambers in a muon beam at CERN under unprecedentedly high γ irradiation show the advantages of the new shaping schemes. The findings are supported by detailed simulations of the high rate effects and allow for prediction of the performance of the sMDT chambers and new readout electronics at the background particle fluxes expected at the FCC.