Tungsten Alloy Outgassing Measurements

Tungsten alloys have not seen extensive use in liquid argon calorimeters so far. Because the manufacturing process for tungsten is different from the more common metals used in liquid argon there is concern that tungsten could poison the argon thereby creating difficulties for precision calorimetry. In this paper we report measurements of outgassing from the tungsten alloy slugs proposed for use in the ATLAS FCal module and estimate limits on potential poisoning with reasonable assumptions. This estimate gives an upper limit poisoning rate of </= 2 ppb/yr into a volume of liquid argon equal to the volume of tungsten slugs.