First ATLAS New Small Wheel nears completion

On Friday 28 May 2021, a team of physicists and engineers installed the final "wedge" of the first ATLAS New Small Wheel detector-system at CERN. This was an important milestone for the ATLAS Collaboration, in preparation for the wheel's installation in the ATLAS cavern later this summer.

Members of the chair of experimental particle physics at LMU Munich are leading the German detector contribution to the New-Small-Wheels. Together with collaborators from three other universities (University of Freiburg, University of Mainz and University of Wuerzburg), 32 four-layered Micromegas detector modules were built and delivered to CERN, 16 per wheel and each two square meters in size.

Each layer of a module is micro structured into 3072 read-out strips, enabling a spatial resolution of 0.1 millimetres for muons traversing the detector. Each module was assembled at LMU Munich and was carefully commissioned and precision-calibrated for about a week at the local cosmic-ray facility in Garching.

Members of the chair contributed substantially at CERN to the final integration of the Micromegas detector modules onto the first of two New Small Wheels.

Find more information and images on public website of the ATLAS Collaboration.