The TileCal Laser Calibration System

TileCal is the central hadronic calorimeter of the ATLAS detector operating at LHC. It is a sampling calorimeter whose active material is made of scintillating plastic tiles. Scintillation light is read by photomultipliers. A Laser system is used to monitor their gain stability. During dedicated calibration runs the Laser system sends via long optical fibers, a monitored amount of light simultaneously to all the ≈10000 photomultipliers of TileCal. This note describes two complementary methods to measure the stability of the photomultipliers gain using the Laser calibration runs. The results of validation tests are presented for both methods and theirrespective performances and limitations are discussed.