Surface Commissioning and Performance of the sMDT Muon Chambers for the ATLAS HL-LHC Upgrade
To improve the first-level muon trigger efficiency at the HL-LHC, the Monitored Drift Tube (MDT) chambers in the inner small sectors of the ATLAS Barrel Muon Spectrometer will be replaced with integrated modules of small-Diameter Muon Drift Tube (sMDT) and Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs). This paper reports on the surface commissioning of 102 new sMDT chambers at CERN in 2025 following the installation of the final front-end electronics, including the new Amplifier-Shaper-Discriminator (ASD), Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) chips, and Chamber Service Module (CSM) developed for the HL-LHC. The commissioning included measurements of gas leak rates and high-voltage dark currents, tests of the integrated planarity monitoring system, noise characterization, and measurements of detector efficiency and spatial resolution using cosmic rays. Fewer than 0.1\% of the 49152 tubes were found to be non-functional due to broken sense wires or gas leaks. The chambers exceed the ATLAS design requirements, with gas leak rates a factor of five below the specified limit of $9.3\times 10^{-3}~\mathrm{mbar\cdot liter/s}$ per chamber, dark currents of only around 0.2~nA per tube, average channel noise hit rates below 30~Hz, and average drift tube efficiency and spatial resolution of 99\% and $82~μ\mathrm{m}$, respectively, at an effective threshold of 15 primary electrons.