Neutron sensitivity of thin gap chambers

Thin gap chambers (TGC) will be used for triggering forward muons in the ATLAS detector for the LHC at CERN. A large amount of neutron background is foreseen in the ATLAS experiment. This paper describes the measurements of the neutron sensitivities (detection efficiencies) of the TGCs. The sensitivities of both small and real size TGCs to 2.5 and 14 MeV mono-energetic neutrons were measured. For a small size TGC, sensitivities of 0.032% and 0.10% were measured to 2.5 and 14 MeV neutrons, respectively, whereas for a real size TGC, sensitivities of 0.048% and 0.13% were measured. These measured values were in reasonably good agreement with the simulations based on the Geant4.