Commissioning of the Atlas Tile Calorimeter

TileCal is the barrel hadronic calorimeter for Atlas at the Lhc/CERN, made of iron and scintillating tiles and read out by wavelength-shifting fibers and photomultipliers. The commissioning of the detector in the Atlas cavern started in 2005, and in September 2008, it participated successfully in the data taking with the Lhc start-up single beam runs, with more than 98 % of the channels active. After the Lhc shutdown, the TileCal commissioning activities focused on repairing additional channels, improving the detector calibrations and data quality procedures, and using the cosmic muon data to provide cross-checks on those calibrations an on the overall performance of the detector. This communication summarizes these aspects of the recent TileCal commissioning activities and provides a status of the detector readiness for pp collisions.