Muon Identification at ATLAS and CMS

TL;DR

This paper discusses the muon identification capabilities of ATLAS and CMS at the LHC, highlighting their high efficiency, resolution, and different detection strategies for muon reconstruction.

Contribution

It compares the complementary muon detection concepts of ATLAS and CMS, detailing their efficiency and resolution performance at high energies.

Findings

Muon identification efficiency exceeds 96%.

Transverse momentum resolution is better than 2% below 400 GeV/c.

Resolution degrades to about 10% at 1 TeV/c.

Abstract

Muonic final states will provide clean signatures formany physics processes at the LHC. The two LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS will be able to identify muons with a high reconstruction efficiency above 96% and a high transverse momentum resolution better than 2% for transverse momenta below 400 GeV/c and about 10% at 1 TeV/c. The two experiments follow complentary concepts of muon detection. ATLAS has an instrumented air-toroid mangetic system serving as a stand-alone muon spectrometer. CMS relies on high bending power and momentum resolution in the inner detector, and uses an iron yoke to increase its magnetic field. The iron yoke is instrumented with chambers used for muon identification. Therefore, muon momenta can only be reconstructed with high precision by combining inner-detector information with the data from the muon chambers.