A quality assurance and quality control (QA QC) procedure of the monitored drift tubes (MDT) for the BIS-chambers of the ATLAS muon spectrometer

The ATLAS detector for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN of which construction has recently started, will study the products of proton collisions at energies of up to 14 TeV. One of its subdetectors is a high-resolution Muon Spectrometer designed to exploit the physics potentials of the collisions. It consists of 1206 Monitored Drift Tube (MDT) chambers, which will be built in 13 institutes of the ATLAS collaboration. Three Greek Universities (University of Athens, National Technical University and University of Thessaloniki) have undertaken the responsibility to construct 30 000 drift tubes of 1.67 length, to test them and to finally to build 128 BIS (Barrel Inner Small) chambers. Dedicated setups have been developed and automated at the National Technical University of Athens for the Quality Assurance and Quality Control (QA QC) procedures of the drift tubes. The QA QC tests include anode wire tension measurement, high voltage dark current measurement, anode wire displacement measurement and gas leak-rate measurement of the end-plugs and the cylinder. Up to now about 10 000 drift tubes have been tested.