The ATLAS Liquid Argon Electromagnetic EndCap Calorimeter: Construction and tests

This thesis has been carried out within the ATLAS collaboration. ATLAS is one of the two multipurpose experiments approved for data taking at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The main goals of this experiment are, to find the Higgs boson, the missing piece in the otherwise so succesful Standard Model of Particle Physics, and to look for physics beyond the Standard Model up to a scale of 1TeV. For this purpose, electromagnetic (EM) calorimetry play a key role. The ATLAS Collaboration has chosen a Liquid Argon (LAr) option with lead as passive material. The liquid Argon Calorimeter is divided into two main subdetectors, the barrel and the end caps (EC). The design and construction of the LAr EM EC calorimeter is the responsability of the groups at Centre de Physique de Marseille (CPPM) and the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM)following the guideline developed by the research and development working, group 3 for LHC detectors (RD3). The sharing of responsabilities is such that CPPM provides spacers and electrodes and UAM absorbers. The design and construction of the cold electronics, summing and mother boards, has also been shared between both groups. CPPM and UAM as construction sites also share the assembly of the suixteen octants into which both end cap wheels are split up. CPPM took the additional responsability of building Module 0, a real size prototype. At the present stage of the project, september 2003, the first fourteen modules have been completed. Some of these modules have been tested at CERN, namely ECC0, ECC1 and ECC5. The thesis is organized as follows. Chapter 1 is meant as an introduction to the LHC and the ATLAS detector. Chapter 2 summarizes the basic principles of electromagnetic calorimetry. Chapter 3 is devoted to a description of the EMEC and stacking procedures. The problems and succeses encountered in the analysis of Module 0 are described in Chapter 4. The solutions found to those problems and the results obtained with the first module built at UAM are presented in Chpter 5. Chapter 6 is devoted to conclusions.