Neutron intensive irradiation test on ATLAS MDT chambers at TAPIRO nuclear reactor

The Monitored Drift Tubes (MDT) chambers are the tracking device for the ATLAS muon spectrometer. They will have to cope with a high rate and high background environment; for this reason, possible aging effects must be taken into account in the choice of the operating point. Moreover, an upgrade of LHC to 10 times higher luminosity is also foreseen. To test detector robustness, a MDT test chamber was exposed to intensive neutron irradiation at the TAPIRO ENEA-Casaccia Research Center.