ATLAS Tile calorimeter calibration and monitoring systems

The ATLAS Tile Calorimeter is the central section of the hadronic calorimeter of the ATLAS experiment and provides important information for reconstruction of hadrons, jets, hadronic decays of tau leptons and missing transverse energy. This sampling calorimeter uses steel plates as absorber and scintillating tiles as active medium. The light produced by the passage of charged particles is transmitted by wavelength shifting fibres to photomultiplier tubes, located in the outer part of the calorimeter. Neutral particles may also produce a signal after interacting with the material and producing charged particles. The readout is segmented into about 5000 cells, each of them being read out by two photomultiplier in parallel. To calibrate and monitor the stability and performance of each part of the readout chain during the data taking, a set of calibration systems is used. The calibration system comprises Cesium radioactive sources, laser, charge injection elements and an integrator based readout system. Combined information from all systems allows to monitor and equalise the calorimeter response at each stage of the signal production, from scintillation light to digitisation. Calibration runs are monitored from a data quality perspective and used as a cross-check for physics runs. Data quality in physics runs is monitored extensively and continuously. The data quality efficiency achieved was 99.6% in 2012, 100% in 2015 and 98.9% in 2016. The calibration and stability of the calorimeter are discussed. These results show that the TileCal performance is within the design requirements and has given essential contribution to reconstructed objects and physics results.