Small-Strip Thin Gap Chambers for the Muon Spectrometer Upgrade of the ATLAS Experiment

The instantaneous luminosity of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will be increased by about a factor of five with respect to the design value by undergoing an extensive upgrade program over the coming decade. The largest phase-1 upgrade project for the ATLAS Muon System is the replacement of the present first station in the forward regions with the New Small Wheels (NSWs) during the long-LHC shutdown in 2019-2021. Along with Micromegas, the NSWs will be equipped with eight layers of small-strip thin gap chambers (sTGC) arranged in multilayers of two quadruplets, for a total active surface of more than 2500 m2. To retain the good precision tracking and trigger capabilities in the high background environment of the high luminosity LHC, each sTGC plane must achieve a spatial resolution better than 100 μm to allow the Level-1 trigger track segments to be reconstructed with an angular resolution of approximately 1mrad. The basic sTGC structure consists of a grid of gold-plated tungsten wires sandwiched between two resistive cathode planes at a small distance from the wire plane. The precision cathode plane has strips with a 3.2mm pitch for precision readout and the cathode plane on the other side has pads for triggering. The sTGC design, performance, construction and integration status will be discussed, along with results from tests of the chambers with nearly final electronics with beams, cosmic rays and high-intensity radiation sources.