Performance of the ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeter after three years of LHC operation and plans for a future upgrade

Understand

The ATLAS experiment is designed to study the proton-proton collisions produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

• Liquid argon sampling calorimeters are used for all electromagnetic calorimetry as well as hadronic calorimetry in the endcaps.
• After installation in 2004--2006, the calorimeters were extensively commissioned over the three--year period prior to first collisions in 2009, using cosmic rays and single LHC beams.
• Since then, approximately 27 fb$\mathbf{^{-1}}$ of data have been collected at an unprecedented center of mass energy.