Time-assisted energy reconstruction in a highly-granular hadronic calorimeter

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that incorporating nanosecond-level timing information into software compensation algorithms for a highly-granular hadronic calorimeter improves energy resolution by 3-4%, with potential for further enhancement.

Contribution

It extends existing software compensation methods by integrating time information at the cell level, showing significant resolution improvements in simulations.

Findings

Timing information improves energy resolution by 3-4%.

High correlation between energy density and timing limits global timing benefits.

Further improvements possible with better timing resolution.

Abstract

The software compensation algorithms developed for the CALICE Analog Hadron Calorimeter are extended to incorporate time information on the cell level, and the performance is studied in GEANT4 simulations with a detector model of a highly-granular SiPM-on-tile calorimeter. The addition of nanosecond-level time resolution is found to result in significant improvement of the energy resolution by approximately 3% to 4% for local software compensation compared to the software compensation based on local energy density alone, with further improvement possible with better timing resolution. The high correlation of energy density and time variables show that both provide sensitivity to correlated underlying shower features, which limits the potential of timing information when used as a global rather than a local variable.