Production and quality control of MWPC for the LHCb muon system at CERN

Abstract

This work describes the production and quality control of the multi-wire proportional chamber for the LHCb muon detection system. The European Laboratory of Particle Physics (CERN) is in charge of the production of 134 chambers for the inner regions of the five Muon Stations. These chambers have demanding requirements on rate capability (>100 kHz/cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ) and efficiency (>99%) in a short time window (20 ns), on overall response uniformity which has to be better than 30%, and on the aging properties. The technical design of the chambers is briefly presented, and the production line is described together with the quality assurance and quality control programs. This includes fabrication of the panels; wire winding, gluing, and soldering; gap uniformity control; pitch and wire tension measurement; gas leak tests; high-voltage training; and tests under intense radiation. An original method developed for gas gain uniformity measurements is described in detail, and the obtained results are shown