Commissioning of the ATLAS liquid argon calorimeters

ATLAS, a multi-purpose detector built at the LHC at CERN, requires an extensive commissioning campaign to be ready for proton-proton collisions. In this work, we focus on the commissioning of the liquid Argon (LAr) calorimeters, with emphasis on commissioning with cosmic rays. First we outline one phase of the commissioning work, which involves testing of the front-end electronics of the two endcap calorimeters. We then describe two cosmic ray generators as input to a Monte-Carlo simulation of cosmic rays in ATLAS, and compare their results. Finally, we explain a technique developed for this work which uses information from the Tile calorimeters to predict the timing of cosmic rays within the LAr calorimeters, because cosmic rays occur randomly in time whereas the electronics are clocked at 1/40.08 MHz. The results from this analysis tool are compared to default tools, using both simulated and real cosmic ray data in the calorimeters.