Detailed studies of hadronic showers and comparison to GEANT4 simulations with data from highly granular calorimeters

TL;DR

This paper presents detailed measurements of hadronic shower structures in highly granular calorimeters and compares them with Geant4 simulations to validate and improve modeling of hadronic interactions.

Contribution

It provides comprehensive experimental data on hadronic showers with unprecedented granularity and compares these with various Geant4 models to identify discrepancies and guide improvements.

Findings

Detailed spatial and substructure measurements of hadronic showers.

Identification of discrepancies between data and Geant4 simulations.

Validation of calorimeter performance with different absorber materials.

Abstract

The highly granular calorimeter prototypes of the CALICE collaboration have provided large data samples with precise three-dimensional information on hadronic showers with steel and tungsten absorbers and silicon, scintillator and gas detector readout. From these data sets, detailed measurements of the spatial structure, including longitudinal and lateral shower profiles and of the shower substructure and time structure are extracted. Recent analyses have extended these studies to different particle species in calorimeters with scintillator readout and steel and tungsten absorbers, to energies below 10 GeV in a silicon tungsten calorimeter and have provided first studies of the shower substructure with gaseous readout and unprecedented granularity of $1\times1$~cm$^{2}$ over a full cubic meter. These results are confronted with Geant4 simulations with different hadronic physics models. They present new challenges to the simulation codes and provide the possibility to validate and improve the simulation of hadronic interactions in high-energy physics detectors.