Studies of cosmic ray events in ATLAS sTGC muon chamber prototypes

Four years after its first long shutdown in 2015, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be shut down once more for a luminosity upgrade. During that time, the ATLAS detector on the LHC ring will also follow an upgrade program, one upgrade being the replacement of the Small Muon Wheels for a New Small Wheel containing small-strip Thin Gap Chambers (sTGCs). The sTGCs built in Canada will be tested at McGill University before their installation in ATLAS. A testing facility has been constructed and a 40 × 60 cm^2 sTGC prototype has been used to deliver preliminary measurements from cosmic rays. This thesis will present the development of a robust tracking algorithm which can handle extra clusters and multiple tracks in an sTGC detector. This algorithm also categorizes events based on their number of clusters and tracks. By modifying the trigger time window of the sTGC prototype, the evolution of the distribution of events over this categorization is shown.