ATLAS MDT chamber behaviour after neutron irradiation and in a high rate background

Many of the physics processes of interest at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will involve muon production in the final state. The Monitored Drift Tube (MDT) chambers, the precision tracking elements of the ATLAS muon spectrometer, are the main tools for the muon identification and measurement. They will operate in the harsh LHC background environment, mainly due to low energy photons and neutrons which will dominate the counting rate in most areas of the spectrometer, where an overall maximum counting rate of 500 Hz / cm 2 is expected. The upgrade to Super-LHC will involve fluxes ten times higher. To study the behaviour of MDT chambers under massive neutron irradiation at the level of Super-LHC, a test was performed at the “Tapiro” Neutron Facility of the ENEA “La Casaccia” Research Center.