Measurement of the front-end dead-time of the LHCb muon detector and evaluation of its contribution to the muon detection inefficiency

A method is described which allows to deduce the dead-time of the front-end electronics of the LHCb muon detector from a series of measurements performed at different luminosities at a bunch-crossing rate of 20 MHz. The measured values of the dead-time range from ~ 70 ns to ~ 100 ns. These results allow to estimate the performance of the muon detector at the future bunch-crossing rate of 40 MHz and at higher luminosity.