Particle Showers in a Highly Granular Hadron Calorimeter

TL;DR

This paper reports on the development and testing of a highly granular hadron calorimeter prototype with 7608 channels, providing detailed data on hadronic showers to improve modeling and energy reconstruction in future collider detectors.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale, highly granular calorimeter prototype with silicon photomultiplier readout, enabling detailed shower analysis and model validation.

Findings

Detailed longitudinal and lateral shower profiles compared to models

Successful operation of 7608-channel calorimeter in beam tests

Improved energy reconstruction using software compensation techniques

Abstract

The CALICE collaboration has constructed highly granular electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeter prototypes to evaluate technologies for the use in detector systems at a future Linear Collider. The hadron calorimeter uses small scintillator cells individually read out with silicon photomultipliers. The system with 7608 channels has been successfully operated in beam tests at DESY, CERN and Fermilab since 2006, and represents the first large scale tests of these devices in high energy physics experiments. The unprecedented granularity of the detector provides detailed information of the properties of hadronic showers, which helps to constrain hadronic shower models through comparisons with model calculations. We will discuss results on longitudinal and lateral shower profiles compared to a variety of different shower models, and present studies of the energy reconstruction of hadronic showers using software compensation techniques.