Large-scale performance studies of the Resistive Plate Chamber fast tracker for the ATLAS first-level muon trigger

Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) provide the first-level muon trigger and the measurement of the coordinate in the non-bending direction in the barrel region of the muon spectrometer of the ATLAS experiment. Calibrating such a system means fine-tuning thousands of parameters (involving both front-end electronics and gap voltages) as well as constantly monitoring performance and environmental quantities such as gap efficiency, average cluster size, temperature, gas flow, gap currents, counting rates. In this paper the RPC calibration effort will be presented. An overview of the performance measurements done using cosmic rays will be also given.