Micromegas chamber production starts at JINR in preparation for ATLAS upgrade

The first Micromegas readout panel for the ATLAS Muon Spectrometer upgrade has been successfuly assembled at the JINR production site. The production site has been set up specially for this work in the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems and comprises a clean room and assembly equipment. The Micromegas technology allows to construct the advanced micropattern gaseous particle detectors. This technology did not exist at JINR until now.

JINR takes part in the mass production of Micromegas chambers to construct New Small Wheels of the ATLAS detector in scope of the ATLAS upgrade for the High Luminosity LHC run. NSW will replace already existing forward muon-tracking detectors, which won't be able to cope with the high background rate during Run-3. The production site at the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems should produce and test 64 two-sided readout panels for the outer part of the NSW Large Sectors. The area of each panel is about 3 m2. Being assembled with the drift panels produced at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, these panels will be used to produce 32 Micromegas quadruplets, which should be tested and shipped to CERN. This work also will be done at JINR.

Mass production at the DLNP site should start in July 2017. The schedule is very tight: all Micromegas chambers should be produced during 22 months. The chambers are expected to be installed in the ATLAS cavern in 2019.