Study of the response of ATLAS electromagnetic liquid argon calorimeters to muons

The response of the ATLAS electromagnetic calorimeter to muons has been studied in this paper. Results on signal over noise ratio, assessment of the detector response uniformity, and position resolution are presented. The possibility to study fine details of the structure of the detector through its response to muons is illustrated on a specific example. Finally, the performance obtained on muons in test-beam is used to estimate the detector uniformity and time alignment precision that will be reachable after the commissioning of the ATLAS detector with cosmic rays. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.