A highly granular SiPM-on-tile calorimeter prototype

TL;DR

This paper presents the design, construction, and initial test results of a highly granular SiPM-on-tile calorimeter prototype for linear collider detectors, emphasizing scalable manufacturing and integration techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable, mass-producible calorimeter prototype with integrated front-end electronics and demonstrates its commissioning and initial test beam performance.

Findings

Successful assembly using mass production techniques

Prototype operated and collected data at CERN SPS

First test beam results show promising performance

Abstract

The Analogue Hadron Calorimeter (AHCAL) developed by the CALICE collaboration is a scalable engineering prototype for a Linear Collider detector. It is a sampling calorimeter of steel absorber plates and plastic scintillator tiles read out by silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) as active material (SiPM-on-tile). The front-end chips are integrated into the active layers of the calorimeter and are designed for minimizing power consumption by rapidly cycling the power according to the beam structure of a linear accelerator. 38 layers of the sampling structure are equipped with cassettes containing 576 single channels each, arranged on readout boards and grouped according to the 36 channel readout chips. The prototype has been assembled using techniques suitable for mass production, such as injection-moulding and semi-automatic wrapping of scintillator tiles, assembly of scintillators on electronics using pick-and-place machines and mass testing of detector elements. The calorimeter was commissioned at DESY and was taking data at the CERN SPS at the time of the conference. The contribution discusses the construction, commissioning and first test beam results of the CALICE AHCAL engineering prototype.