Hadronic energy resolution of a highly granular scintillator-steel hadron calorimeter using software compensation techniques

TL;DR

This paper investigates the energy resolution of a highly granular scintillator-steel hadronic calorimeter for charged pions, demonstrating significant improvements using software compensation techniques that leverage detailed shower substructure information.

Contribution

It introduces and evaluates software compensation methods that enhance hadronic energy resolution by utilizing event-by-event shower substructure data from a highly granular calorimeter.

Findings

Energy resolution improved from 58%/√E to 45%/√E with software compensation.

Compensation techniques based on local energy density and global measures are effective.

Simulation results align with experimental data, confirming the methods' robustness.

Abstract

The energy resolution of a highly granular 1 m3 analogue scintillator-steel hadronic calorimeter is studied using charged pions with energies from 10 GeV to 80 GeV at the CERN SPS. The energy resolution for single hadrons is determined to be approximately 58%/sqrt(E/GeV}. This resolution is improved to approximately 45%/sqrt(E/GeV) with software compensation techniques. These techniques take advantage of the event-by-event information about the substructure of hadronic showers which is provided by the imaging capabilities of the calorimeter. The energy reconstruction is improved either with corrections based on the local energy density or by applying a single correction factor to the event energy sum derived from a global measure of the shower energy density. The application of the compensation algorithms to Geant4 simulations yield resolution improvements comparable to those observed for real data.