arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to O. Miller.
Space, time, and additional dimensions spawn remarkable complexity in optics. We encourage pairing black-box simulation and design tools with a complementary tool: understanding.
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.
Progress is reported on the development and testing of Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) for a Si-W ECAL for the ILC. Using laser and source setups, a first version of the sensor has been characterised through measurements of the absolute gain calibration, noise and pedestal. The pixel-to-pixel gain spread is 10%. Charge diffusion has been measured and found to be compatible with simulation results. The charge collected by a single pixel varies from 50% to 20% depending on where it is generated. After adding detector effects to the Geant4 simulation of an ILC-like ECAL, using the measured parameters, the energy resolution is found to be 35% higher than the ideal resolution, but is still lower than the resolution obtained for an equivalent analogue ECAL.
The CALICE collaboration is studying the design of high performance electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters for future International Linear Collider detectors. For the electromagnetic calorimeter, the current baseline choice is a high granularity sampling calorimeter with tungsten as absorber and silicon detectors as sensitive material. A ``physics prototype'' has been constructed, consisting of thirty sensitive layers. Each layer has an active area of 18x18 cm2 and a pad size of 1x1 cm2. The absorber thickness totals 24 radiation lengths. It has been exposed in 2006 and 2007 to electron and hadron beams at the DESY and CERN beam test facilities, using a wide range of beam energies and incidence angles. In this paper, the prototype and the data acquisition chain are described and a summary of the data taken in the 2006 beam tests is presented. The methods used to subtract the pedestals and calibrate the detector are detailed. The signal-over-noise ratio has been measured at 7.63 +/- 0.01. Some electronics features have been observed; these lead to coherent noise and crosstalk between pads, and also crosstalk between sensitive and passive areas. The performance achieved in terms of uniformity and stability is presented.
A novel design for a silicon-tungsten electromagnetic calorimeter is described, based on Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS). A test sensor with a pixel size of 50x50 um2 has been fabricated in July 2007. The simulation of the physical sensor is done using a detailed three-dimensional charge spread algorithm. Physics studies of the sensor are done including a digitisation algorithm taking into account the charge sharing, charge collection efficiency, noise, and dead areas. The influence of the charge sharing effect is found to be important and hence needs to be measured precisely.