High accuracy wire chambers

Wire chambers are and will be a major component of present and future collider experiments. Using the precision tracking drift chambers of the ATLAS muon spectrometer and the trigger detectors of the LHCb muon spectrometer as examples, several key features of these wire chambers will be discussed. Position resolution better than 80 μm and time resolution better than 3 ns are feasible for detector systems of several 100 m2 and several 100,000 channels. The high rate capability of the detectors and the access to cheap, radiation tolerant electronics technologies makes these detectors applicable at very high luminosity accelerators. Also the fact that these detectors can be simulated and understood in great detail will be shown.