Certification and commissioning of barrel stations for the ATLAS muon spectrometer

The muon spectrometer of the ATLAS experiment, which is scheduled to commence data taking at the Large Hadron Collider, LHC at CERN in 2007, comprises more than a thousand muon stations, which have the double purpose of triggering on high-p_t muon tracks as well as providing precise trajectory reconstruction. While monitored drift tube chambers are used for track reconstruction in all of the muon spectrometer except for a region close to the beam pipe in forward direction, two different technologies are used for triggering, resistive plate chambers in the barrel region and thin gap chambers in the end-caps. Both have in common that the ATLAS geometry allows only limited accessibility after chambers are installed in the detector. A thorough testing and certification prior to installation is therefore crucial. This paper reviews the test procedure at CERN for barrel chambers of type BO and BM, i.e. of stations for which a drift chamber is coupled with one or two resistive plate chambers. The final certification criterion is the passing of a 1-day cosmic ray test, for which a special setup has been built during the last year. Questions of verifying cable maps, HV stability and drift properties are addressed