Performance validation tests of the cathode strip chambers for CMS muon system

The CMS muon cathode strip chambers, comprising 2,000,000 anode wires and covering 6000 square meters of sensitive area, are the largest system of multi-wire proportional chambers ever built and by far exceed the preceding systems with precision digitization of cathode strip signals. The 468 CMS chambers reconstruct muons with a 100-micron spatial resolution (offline) and identify 6-hit muon track stubs (trigger primitives to be used by level-1 trigger) with 1-mm and 4-ns uncertainties. The chamber construction took 4 years and now is finished, with nearly all detectors having been installed and commissioned in CMS. The organization of various phases of detector performance validation tests from the moment of their assembly to the final commissioning in CMS. The experience and results obtained during these tests of more than 400 chambers are summarized at the end