Chamber Performance of Prototype Resistive Plate Chambers for the PHENIX Forward Trigger Upgrade

The Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction Experiment (PHENIX) is located on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) ring at Brookhaven National Laboratory. One of the ultimate goals at RHIC is to obtain a more accurate understanding of a proton's intrinsic spin structure through polarized proton-proton collisions. The parity violating decay of W-bosons created in some of these collisions allow for the determination of flavor separated quark distribution functions. Recently, PHENIX has been focusing on the construction and installation of Resistive Plate Chambers (RPC's) as part of upgrade to the PHENIX muon trigger. These RPC's are useful in the selection of high transverse momentum muon events from a background of low transverse momentum muon events. The second RPC station for the North side of the detector is still in the prototype stage. In order to make sure that this RPC is as efficient as possible, it is vital to reduce the amount of noise in the chamber. Efforts to measure and decrease the noise rates for the prototype will be further discussed.