Design, construction and operation of a Drift Chamber prototype for the SAND inner tracker of the DUNE Experiment

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment is a long-baseline neutrino experiment under construction in the United States. It will be composed of a Near Detector system and a Far Detector composed of four multi-kt LArTPCs. The experiment will primarily measure the leptonic CP violation phase and discriminate the ordering of neutrino masses. One component of the Near detector complex is the System for on-Axis Neutrino Detection apparatus, which will host a calorimeter, a system of trackers, and an active LAr target inside a superconducting magnet. A drift chamber-based tracking system is being developed, featuring passive target planes of polypropylene and carbon, to provide multiple nuclear targets for the measurement of neutrino cross-sections. A small-scale and a medium-scale drift chamber prototype have been built and tested at the CERN SPS H4 beam line. My work focused on the design of the prototypes, their construction and commissioning. This thesis describes the R&D studies that I personally conducted to validate the proposal of a drift chamber-based tracker for SAND and presents the preliminary results obtained from the analysis of the beam test data. As a corollary to these activities, the thesis also presents the results of the experimental tests and simulations of the noise affecting the front-end of the TIGER ASIC, executed in the context of the R&D project on micro-RWELL detectors, which will compose the muon system of the IDEA detector for the Future Circular Collider. TIGER is used for the readout of micro-RWELLs and was also employed during the drift chamber prototype beam test; hence, the studies on the TIGER front-end were synergistic with the work carried out for both DUNE and the FCC project. The results of the tests of the TIGER readout applied to micro-RWELLs are presented, together with the beam test of several prototypes featuring different layouts.