ATLAS New Small Wheel performance studies after first year of operation

Abstract

After successfully completing Phase I upgrades during LHC Long Shutdown 2, the ATLAS detector is back in operation with several upgrades implemented. The most important and challenging upgrade is in the Muon Spectrometer, where the two inner forward muon stations have been replaced with the New Small Wheels (NSWs) system featuring two entirely new detector technologies: small strip Thin Gap Chambers (sTGC) and the resistive Micromegas (MM). After massive construction, testing and installation work in ATLAS, the two NSWs end-caps have now been in operation for about a year in the experiment, participating in the muon spectrometer tracking system and muon trigger system. A huge effort has gone into the operation of the new data acquisition system, as well as the implementation of a new processing chain within the muon software framework. Tracking is performed with full consideration of the absolute alignment of each individual detector module by the ATLAS Muon Spectrometer optical alignment system. All the deviations from the nominal geometry of all the constituent elements of each sTGC and MM module are accounted for through the modelling of the real chamber geometry reconstructed from the information of the construction databases. After an overview of the strategies adopted for the simulations and reconstruction, the studies on the performance of the NSW system in its first year of operation with LHC Run3 data will be reported.