New Small Wheel Technical Design Report

In order to benefit from the expected high luminosity performance that will be provided by the Phase-I upgraded LHC, the first station of the ATLAS muon end-cap system (Small Wheel,SW) will need to be replaced. The New Small Wheel (NSW) will have to operate in a high background radiation region (up to 15 kHz=cm2) while reconstructing muon tracks with high precision, as well as furnishing information for the Level-1 trigger. These performance criteria are demanding. In particular, the precision reconstruction of tracks for offline analysis requires a spatial resolution of about 100microns, and the Level-1 trigger track segments have to be reconstructed online with an angular resolution of approximately 1mrad. The NSW will have two chamber technologies, one primarily devoted to the Level-1 trigger function (small-strip Thin Gap Chambers, sTGC) and one dedicated to precision tracking (Micromegas detectors, MM). The sTGC are primarily deployed for triggering given their single bunch crossing identification capability. The MM detectors have exceptional precision tracking capabilities due to their small gap (5mm) and strip pitch (approximately 0.5mm). Such a precision is crucial to maintain the current ATLAS muon momentum resolution in the high background environment of the upgraded LHC. The MM chambers can, at the same time, confirm the existence of track segments found by the muon end-cap middle station (Big Wheels) online. The sTGC also has the ability to measure offline muon tracks with good precision, so the sTGC-MM chamber technology combination forms a fully redundant detector system for triggering and tracking both for online and offline functions. This detector combination has been designed to be able to also provide excellent performance for the eventual High Luminosity LHC upgrade