A facility for the test of large-area muon chambers at high rates

Operation of large-area muon detectors at the future Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be characterized by large sustained hit rates over the whole area, reaching the range of kHz cm-2. We describe a dedicated test zone built at CERN to test the performance and the aging of the muon chambers currently under development. A radioactive source delivers photons causing the sustained rate of random hits, while a narrow beam of high-energy muons is used to directly calibrate the detector performance. A system of remotely controlled lead filters serves to vary the rate of photons over four orders of magnitude, to allow the study of performance as a function of rate. (authors)