An analog hadron calorimeter (AHCAL) prototype of 5.3 nuclear interaction lengths thickness has been constructed by members of the CALICE Collaboration. The AHCAL prototype consists of a 38-layer sandwich structure of steel plates and highly-segmented scintillator tiles that are read out by wavelength-shifting fibers coupled to SiPMs. The signal is amplified and shaped with a custom-designed ASIC. A calibration/monitoring system based on LED light was developed to monitor the SiPM gain and to measure the full SiPM response curve in order to correct for non-linearity. Ultimately, the physics goals are the study of hadron shower shapes and testing the concept of particle flow. The technical goal consists of measuring the performance and reliability of 7608 SiPMs. The AHCAL was commissioned in test beams at DESY and CERN. The entire prototype was completed in 2007 and recorded hadron showers, electron showers and muons at different energies and incident angles in test beams at CERN and Fermilab.

A prototype Silicon-Tungsten electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL) for an International Linear Collider (ILC) detector was installed and tested during summer and autumn 2006 at CERN. The detector had 6480 silicon pads of dimension 1×1 cm 2 . Data were collected with electron beams in the energy range 6 to 45 GeV. The analysis described in this paper focuses on electromagnetic shower reconstruction and characterises the ECAL response to electrons in terms of energy resolution and linearity. The detector is linear to within approximately the 1% level and has a relative energy resolution of (16.6 ± 0.1)/ E(GeV) ⊕ 1.1 ± 0.1 (%). The spatial uniformity and the time stability of the ECAL are also addressed.

The technological prototype of the CALICE highly granular silicon-tungsten electromagnetic calorimeter (SiW-ECAL) was tested in a beam at DESY in 2017. The setup comprised seven layers of silicon sensors. Each layer comprised four sensors, with each sensor containing an array of 256 5.5 × 5.5 mm 2 silicon PIN diodes. The four sensors covered a total area of 18 × 18 cm 2 , and comprised a total of 1024 channels. The readout was split into a trigger line and a charge signal line. Key performance results for signal over noise for the two output lines are presented, together with a study of the uniformity of the detector response. Measurements of the response to electrons for the tungsten loaded version of the detector are also presented.

The intrinsic time structure of hadronic showers influences the timing capability and the required integration time of hadronic calorimeters in particle physics experiments, and depends on the active medium and on the absorber of the calorimeter. With the CALICE T3B experiment, a setup of 15 small plastic scintillator tiles read out with Silicon Photomultipliers, the time structure of showers is measured on a statistical basis with high spatial and temporal resolution in sampling calorimeters with tungsten and steel absorbers. The results are compared to GEANT4 (version 9.4 patch 03) simulations with different hadronic physics models. These comparisons demonstrate the importance of using high precision treatment of low-energy neutrons for tungsten absorbers, while an overall good agreement between data and simulations for all considered models is observed for steel.

Silicon-based nanoparticles were produced by irradiating a single-crystal silicon target with 10.6 µm nanosecond transverse excited atmospheric (TEA) pulsed CO 2 laser in de-ionized water. The effects of the laser pulse energies and repetition rate were studied. To reveal the role of thermal effects, a low laser repetition rate has been applied, excluding the interaction of the laser beam with the previously generated cavitation bubble. The analysis of the influence of the laser pulse energies and the laser repetition rate showed that the increase of the laser pulse energies leads to an increase of the nanoparticle size. An explanation of such results was proposed and the importance of the role of the target surface temperature in the ablation process is discussed.