Particle and Astroparticle Physics Seminar

The Digital Hadron Calorimeter: A New Concept and its First Results

Benjamin Freund

Université de Montréal

The future electron-positron International Linear Collider (ILC) has a broad physics program covering topics such as precision measurements of the Higgs Boson and possible detection of Dark Matter or supersymmetric particles. New detector concepts have to be developed to meet the very stringent requirements. For optimised event reconstruction innovative Particle Flow algorithms will have to be applied to all detector systems.

The international CALICE collaboration is developing highly granular calorimeter detectors to that purpose, among them the high granularity Digital Hadron Calorimeter (DHCAL) 1m^3 prototype, based on the Resistive Plate Chamber technology, as developed at the Argonne National Laboratory. Its 460,800-channel read-out makes it the first digital imaging calorimeter ever.

The DHCAL prototype was first tested at Fermilab and CERN with different absorber materials, such as steel and tungsten. In November 2011, test beam data was taken without the additional absorber structures. Data collected with minimal absorber material provides unprecedented insight into the inner structure of both electromagnetic and hadronic showers. The data set is ideal for detailed comparisons with GEANT4-based simulations. Results from the measurements and comparisons with simulations will be presented.