Integration, commissioning and installation of monitored drift tube chambers for the ATLAS barrel muon spectrometer

The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is currently being assembled to be ready to take data in 2007. Its muon spectrometer is designed to achieve a momentum resolution better than 10% at 1 TeV. In the barrel part, a toroidal air-core magnet is instrumented with three layers of Monitored Drift Tube (MDT) chambers for precision tracking. The Max-Planck-Institut für Physik and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich have built 88 MDT chambers for the outermost barrel layer. We report on our experience with the tests of the MDT chambers, their integration with the Resistive Plate trigger chambers and the installation of the muon stations in the experiment. First results of their commissioning in the ATLAS detector will be presented.