The ATLAS Tile Calorimeter performance at the LHC

The Tile Calorimeter (TileCal), the central section of the hadronic calorimeter of the ATLAS experiment, is a key detector component to detect hadrons, jets and taus and to measure the missing transverse energy. Due to the very good muon signal to noise ratio it assists the spectrometer in the identification and reconstruction of muons. TileCal is built of steel and scintillating tiles coupled to optical fibers and read out by photo-multipliers. The calorimeter is equipped with systems that allow to monitor and to calibrate each stage of the readout system exploiting different signal sources: laser light, charge injection and a radioactive source. The performance of the calorimeter has been measured and monitored using calibration data, random triggered data, cosmic muons, splash events and more importantly LHC collision events. The results presented here assess the absolute energy scale calibration precision, the energy and timing uniformity and the synchronization precision. The ensemble of the results demonstrates a very good understanding of the performance of the Tile Calorimeter that is proved to be well within the design expectations.