No abstract

The energy resolution of a highly granular 1 m 3 analogue scintillator-steel hadronic calorimeter is studied using charged pions with energies from 10 GeV to 80 GeV at the CERN SPS. The energy resolution for single hadrons is determined to be approximately 58%/ E/GeV. This resolution is improved to approximately 45%/ E/GeV with software compensation techniques. These techniques take advantage of the event-by-event information about the substructure of hadronic showers which is provided by the imaging capabilities of the calorimeter. The energy reconstruction is improved either with corrections based on the local energy density or by applying a single correction factor to the event energy sum derived from a global measure of the shower energy density. The application of the compensation algorithms to GEANT4 simulations yield resolution improvements comparable to those observed for real data.

The CALICE Semi-Digital Hadronic Calorimeter (SDHCAL) prototype, built in 2011, was exposed to beams of hadrons, electrons and muons in two short periods in 2012 on two different beam lines of the CERN SPS. The prototype with its 48 active layers, made of Glass Resistive Plate Chambers and their embedded readout electronics, was run in triggerless and power-pulsing mode. The performance of the SDHCAL during the test beam was found to be very satisfactory with an efficiency exceeding 90% for almost all of the 48 active layers. A linear response (within ± 5%) and a good energy resolution are obtained for a large range of hadronic energies (5-80 GeV) by applying appropriate calibration coefficients to the collected data for both the Digital (Binary) and the Semi-Digital (Multi-threshold) modes of the SDHCAL prototype. The Semi-Digital mode shows better performance at energies exceeding 30 GeV.

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.