A non-invasive technique to replace the anode wires into the drift tube chambers of the muon spectrometer of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC proton-proton collider

A non-invasive technique to reinsert the anode wire into the drift tubes is presented. The technique has been developed in order to recover damaged tubes due to wire breakage or slippage after chamber assembly. This technique has been employed to rewire drift tubes up to 270 cm in length. The broken wire is first extracted from the drift tube and then a new wire is inserted and tensioned. The drift tube quality controls (i.e. wire tension, dark current and tube gas leak measurements) were performed on each rewired tube. Moreover, all chambers with rewired tubes were tested with cosmic rays. The rewired tubes meet the ATLAS specifications as did the original non-rewired ones.