Muon Energy Measurement from Radiative Losses in a Calorimeter for a Collider Detector

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel method for measuring ultra-high-energy muons by analyzing their radiative energy losses in a dense calorimeter, offering a promising alternative to magnetic curvature-based techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach leveraging calorimeter cluster data to estimate muon energies above 1 TeV, addressing limitations of magnetic field measurements.

Findings

Calorimeter-based energy estimation improves muon energy resolution at high energies.

Radiative loss analysis provides significant complementary information for muon energy measurement.

Feasibility demonstrated using a lead-tungstate calorimeter benchmark.

Abstract

The performance demands of future particle-physics experiments investigating the high-energy frontier pose a number of new challenges, forcing us to find new solutions for the detection, identification, and measurement of final-state particles in subnuclear collisions. One such challenge is the precise measurement of muon momenta at very high energy, where the curvature provided by conceivable magnetic fields in realistic detectors proves insufficient to achieve the desired resolution. In this work we show the feasibility of an entirely new avenue for the measurement of the energy of muons based on their radiative losses in a dense, finely segmented calorimeter. This is made possible by the use of the spatial information of the clusters of deposited photon energy in the regression task. Using a homogeneous lead-tungstate calorimeter as a benchmark, we show how energy losses may provide significant complementary information for the estimate of muon energies above 1 TeV.