Data Quality system of the ATLAS hadronic Tile calorimeter

Abstract

The Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is the central section of the hadronic calorimeter of the ATLAS experiment. It is subdivided into a large central barrel and two smaller lateral extended barrels. Each barrel consists of 64 wedges, made of iron plates and scintillating tiles. Two edges of each scintillating tile are air-coupled to wave-length shifting (WLS) fibres which collect the scintillating light and transmit it to photo-multipliers. The total number of channels is about 10000. An essential part of the TileCal detector is the Data Quality (DQ) system. The DQ system is designed to check the status of the electronic channels. It is designed to provide information at two levels - online and offline. The online TileCal DQ system monitors continuously the data while they are recorded and provides a fast feedback. The offline DQ system allows a detailed study, if needed it provides corrections to be applied to the recorded data and it allows to validate the data for physics analysis. In addition to the check of physics data the TileCal DQ systems also operate with calibration data. The TileCal calibration system provides well defined signals and the response to the calibration signals allows checking the behaviour of the electronic channels in detail. The Monitoring and Calibration Web System supports data quality analyses at the level of channels. All online, offline and calibration versions of the TileCal DQ system also provide automatic tests, the results of which allow fast and robust feedback.