Liquid argon calorimeter performance at high rates

The expected increase of luminosity at HL-LHC by a factor of ten with respect to LHC luminosities has serious consequences for the signal reconstruction, radiation hardness requirements and operations of the ATLAS liquid argon calorimeters in the endcap, respectively forward region. Small modules of each type of calorimeter have been built and exposed to a high intensity proton beam of 50 GeV at IHEP/Protvino. The beam is extracted via the bent crystal technique, offering the unique opportunity to cover intensities ranging from $10^6$ p/s up to $10^{12}$ p/s. This exceeds the deposited energy per time expected at HL-LHC by more than a factor of 100. The correlation between beam intensity and the read-out signal has been studied. The data show clear indications of pulse shape distortion due to the high ionization build-up, in agreement with MC expectations. This is also confirmed from the dependence of the HV currents on beam intensity.