Ricerc@Sapienza

The muon detector of LHCb, which comprises 1368 multi-wire-proportional-chambers (MWPC) for a total area of 435 m2, is the largest instrument of its kind exposed to such a high-radiation environment. In nine years of operation, from 2010 until 2018, we did not observe appreciable signs of ageing of the detector in terms of reduced performance. However, during such a long period, many chamber gas gaps suffered from HV trips.

Optical readout of large Time Projection Chambers (TPCs) with multiple Gas Electron Multipliers (GEMS) amplification stages has shown to provide very interesting performances for high energy particle tracking. Proposed applications for low-energy and rare event studies, such as Dark Matter search, ask for demanding performance in the keV energy range.