Production and test of one-third of barrel Resistive Plate Chambers of the CMS experiment at LHC

Resistive Plate Chambers have been chosen as dedicated trigger muon detectors for the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The barrel RPC detector consists of 480 chambers of different forms and sizes, equipped with 75,000 strips and covering an area of about 2400 m(2). About one-third of RPC barrel chambers have been produced up to the end of 2003 and these 150 chambers, produced and assembled in Italy, have been extensively tested at the two Italian test stands of Bari and Pavia by the RPC barrel collaboration. Preliminary results of the production and test of the chambers will be described here. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved