Time Calibration of the ATLAS Hadronic Tile Calorimeter using the Laser System

The ATLAS Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) will be used to measure i) the energy of hadronic showers and ii) the Time of Flight (ToF) of particles passing through it. To allow for optimal reconstruction of the energy deposited in the calorimeter with optimal filtering, the phase between the signal sampling clock and the maximum of the incoming pulses needs to be minimised and the residual difference needs to be measured for later use for both energy and time of flight measurements. In this note we present the timing equalisation of all TileCal read out channels using the TileCal laser calibration system and a measurement of the time differences between the 4 TileCal TTC partitions. The residual phases after timing equalisation have been measured. Several characteristics of the laser calibration system relevant for timing have also been studied and a solution is proposed to take into account the time difference between the high and low gain paths. Finally we discuss the sources of uncertainties on the timing of the Tile Calorimeter.