Commissioning and Performance of the ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeters

The ATLAS liquid argon (LAr) calorimeter system consists of an electromagnetic barrel calorimeter and two end-caps with electromagnetic, hadronic and forward calorimeters. The construction of the full calorimeter system is completed since mid-2004. The detector has been operated with LAr at nominal high voltage and fully equipped with readout electronics. Online software, monitoring tools and offline signal reconstruction have been developed for data collection and processing. Extensive tests with calibration pulses have been carried out, and the electronics calibration scheme for all 182468 channels has been exercised. Since Augst 2006, cosmic muon data have been collected together with the rest of the ATLAS detector system as part of the ATLAS commissioning program. The reconstructed LAr signals from energy deposited by cosmic rays are compared to the prediction derived from measured detector parameters and calibration pulses. The uniformity of the detector response within regions that have sufficient cosmic muons are examined. The expected performance of the LAr calorimeter for ATLAS physics, based on previous beam tests and Monte Carlo simulation, is also summarised.