High-pressure monitored drift tube chambers for the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider

The ATLAS detector is designed to exploit the full physics discovery potential offered by the Large Hadron Collider, to be built at CERN. With center-of-mass energies of 14 TeV, a proton-proton bunch crossing rate of 40 MHz, resulting luminosities of greater than or equal to 10(34)/cm(2)/s and a requested operating time of 10-15 years, design, construction, and operation of this general purpose detector and its subsystems pose extraordinary challenges. High-precision measurements of final-state muons are amongst the most crucial requirements for the determination of particle signatures, both for known processes and for new discoveries alike. The ATLAS Muon System is fulfilling this requirement through the use of a system of high-pressure Monitored Drift Tube chambers. World-wide, a total of eleven chamber production sites will have to be operated for four years to produce these drift chambers for ATLAS. This article is based on work performed at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Physik in Munich, one of the chamber production sites currently being set up for the ATLAS Muon Project.