sPHENIX HCal discussion

[Anthony Michael Hodges <ahodges21 AT student.gsu.edu>]

Good morning HCal'ers,

Here's my poster abstract for QM2019. Comments are welcome!

Performance Characterization Studies of Scintillator Tiles for the sPHENIX Hadronic Calorimeter

sPHENIX is a next generation jet detector planned to begin taking data at RHIC in 2023. Its goal is to provide measurements of jets and upsilons in 200 GeV Au+Au collisions. To make precision jet energy measurements, sPHENIX will be equipped with a Hadronic Calorimeter (HCal) located outside the solenoidal magnet. The sPHENIX HCal is composed of approximately 7,500 plastic scintillating tiles sandwiched between layers of tapered, steel absorber plates. Light produced by particles striking the tile is captured by a wavelength shifting fiber that routes the light to an Silicone Photomultiplier (SiPM) at one end of the tile. The geometry of the calorimeter itself is tilted in azimuth such that a particle coming from the interaction region will traverse four tiles.

The HCal’s scintillator tiles come in twelve different shapes based on pseudorapidity to accommodate different particle trajectories. Additionally, in azimuth, tiles of the same type are grouped together in sets of five, known as a tower, and the readout from the tower is the aggregate of the signals of each tile within a tower. Results of beam tests carried out at Fermilab have shown that the detector has the required energy resolution to accomplish sPHENIX’s physics goals, but it is possible to decrease the constant term in the resolution by constructing towers out of tiles that perform similarly. To accomplish this, testing has begun at Georgia State University to characterize the performance of each individual tile relative to a baseline reference tile by analyzing the tiles’ response to cosmic rays. This poster will detail the design of the test setup, the analysis procedure, and the current results of the performance characterization studies of the sPHENIX HCal tiles.

Cheers, 

-Anthony

Anthony Hodges

PhD. Student, Georgia State University

Nuclear and High Energy Physics

ahodges21 AT student.gsu.edu