Aging effects in the ATLAS transition radiation tracker and gas filtration studies

The transition radiation tracker (TRT) is one of three particle tracking detectors now under construction for the ATLAS experiment, whose goal is to exploit the highly exciting new physics potential at CERN's next accelerator, the so called Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The TRT consists of 370000 straw proportional tubes of 4 mm diameter with a 30 micron thick anode wire, which will be operated with a Xe/CO
₂
/O
₂
gas mixture at a high voltage of approximately 1.5 kV. While the construction of the TRT is now well under way, a number of interesting and challenging questions need to be solved with regard to wire aging phenomena, which are induced by pollution originating from very small amounts of silicon-based vacuum materials in some components of the gas system. Finally a guideline to avoid aging in wire chamber detectors in high luminosity experiments is given