Performance of the ATLAS Tile Hadronic Calorimeter at LHC in Run 1 and planned upgrades

The Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is the central section of the ATLAS hadronic calorimeter at the Large Hadron Collider, a key detector for the measurements of hadrons, jets, tau leptons and missing transverse energy. Scintillation light produced in the tiles is transmitted by wavelength shifting fibres to photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). The resulting electronic signals from approximately 10000 PMTs are digitized before being transferred to off-detector data-acquisition systems. The data quality procedures used during the LHC data-taking and the evolution of the detector status are explained in the presentation. The energy and the time reconstruction performance of the digitized signals is presented and the noise behaviour and its improvement during the detector consolidation in maintenance periods are shown. A set of calibration systems allow monitoring and equalization of the calorimeter channels responses via signal sources that act at every stage of the signal path, from scintillation light to digitized signal. These partially overlapping systems are described in detail, their individual performance is discussed as well as the comparative results from measurements of the evolution of the calorimeter response with time during the full LHC data-taking period. The TileCal upgrade aims at replacing the majority of the on- and off-detector electronics so that all calorimeter signals will be directly digitized and sent to the off-detector electronics in the counting room. To achieve the required reliability, redundancy has been introduced at different levels. For the off-detector electronics a special pre-processor board is being developed, which will take care of the initial trigger processing while temporarily storing the main data in the pipeline and de-randomiser memories.