The status of the GEM project for CMS high-η muon system

The dedicated CMS R&D program was intended to study the feasibility of using micropattern detectors for the instrumentation of the vacant vertical bar eta vertical bar > 1.6 region in the present Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) endcap system. The proposed detector for CMS is a Triple-Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) trapezoidal chamber, equipped with 1D readout. While during 2010-2011 the Collaboration worked on the prototyping of the detector, during the first part of 2012 a newly developed assembly technique to be used for the mass production was adopted. GEMs can provide precision tracking and fast trigger information, contributing on one hand to the improvement of the CMS muon Trigger and on the other hand to provide the missing redundancy in the high eta region. In the view of the next LHC long shutdown (LS1) the CMS GEM Collaboration designed and built four full-size Triple GEM based muon detectors.