Commissioning ATLAS and CMS with top quarks

The large $t\bar{t}$ production cross-section at the LHC suggests the use of top quark decays to calibrate several critical parts of the detectors, such as the trigger system, the jet energy scale and b-tagging. The ATLAS and CMS experiments will both take advantage of these facts and a brief review of their capabilities is given.The large ttbar production cross-section at the LHC suggests the use of top quark decays to calibrate several critical parts of the detectors, such as the trigger system, the jet energy scale and b-tagging