In the remaining part of this article we apply the guidelines discussed above and introduce a realistic implementation of a integrally active, non-homogeneous dual-readout calorimeter. The detector response of that model will be analyzed with Monte Carlo simulations and the energy resolution will be evaluated as a function of the detector layout and construction parameters. A triple-readout implementation will also be discussed, along with the projected improvement in terms of energy resolution. In spite of using a particular detector model, the results are general enough to be applied to other multiple-readout detectors.
4.1. Detector Layout
The guidelines established above are rather generic and leave ample margins for layouts aimed at specific applications. In the following, we will adopt a particular implementation which has the further advantage of being flexible and easy to optimize.
The
layout considered here has a modular structure, with each module consisting of a cell of rectangular shape with
cross-section and
length. In case of a 4
detector the cell would be longitudinally tapered with an angle of about
°. Roughly 84,000 cells with a projective geometry are necessary to cover the entire solid angle, up to
. Each cell consists of a block of high density, optical grade heavy glass which acts, at the same time, as an absorber and as an active medium, producing almost exclusively Äerenkovlight
2. The scintillating section consists of scintillating fibers interspersed in the heavy glass and sitting in longitudinal grooves along the cell. More details of the two sections are given below.
The Äerenkov section. For the studies reported in this article, we have assumed that the Äerenkovradiator is made with SF57HHT[
37] super-flint glass produced by Schott Industries. This choice, supported by the results of the simulations discussed later (cfr
Section 5.2 and
Section 6), has been made for several reasons:
SF57HHT is a heavy lead glass with a radiation length of about and a Moliére radius of about . In the HEP community the lead glass is often used as active medium of homogeneous electromagnetic calorimeters because of its excellent energy resolution and relatively low costs. This imply that it is also well suited for measuring the electromagnetic component of an hadronic shower.
The hadronic interaction length of SF57HHT glass is about bringing to a compact longitudinal module and and a detector with fine lateral granularity.
The SF57HHT glass is produced using a continuous melting technique. Therefore, long slabs up to a few meters in length can easily be obtained for the construction of cells.
The Äerenkovlight production mechanism depends only on the refractive index of the medium, which is insensitive to changes in ambient parameters. As opposite to crystals, the light yield is also far more insensitive to inhomogeneities, impurities or defects of the medium. As a consequence, manufacturing of lead glass cells is a much more reproducible process than that of crystals;
The SF57HHT is a glass produced for the optical industries. Therefore, it is a highly transparent medium and, even more important, optically homogeneous. The latter property guarantee than non-uniformity in the light transmission are very low, with corresponding lower contributions to the constant term of the energy resolution function.
Lead glass is among the cheapest active media available for a calorimeter.
Figure 6 shows the refractive index curve of SF57HHT and those of several similar lead glasses we have considered for the
project. For wavelengths corresponding to the absorption curve of most commercially available WLS fibers, the refractive index ranges in the [1.85,1.91] interval. Therefore, the Äerenkovthreshold occurs at
, 23% below the Äerenkovthreshold of typical quartz fibers used in sampling dual-readout calorimeters, with a correspondingly larger photostatistics.With a GEANT4 simulation, we estimated that the number of Äerenkovphotons with a wavelength in the
interval being generated by a 40 GeV charged pion showering inside SF57HHT is of the order of
. However, because of the short attenuation length of the glass (shown in
Figure 7), most of those photons are re-absorbed before reaching the photodetector if the latter, as in traditional lead glass calorimeters, is located at one end of each glass block. In order to minimize this problem, the Äerenkovlight of
is collected with a system of wavelength shifting (WLS) fibers embedded in the glass and optically coupled to it. Studies reported here are based on a light collection with four Bicron BCF92 fibers having 2.2 mm diameter, running along the longitudinal axis of each cell (cfr.
Figure 8).
It is worth noting that the optical coupling between the WLS fibers and the absorber further suppresses the Äerenkovlight produced by the slower hadrons. This filtering mechanism is based on Snell’s law and on the fact that slower hadrons emit Äerenkovphotons at a smaller angle than faster electrons. According to this law, the minimum angle,
, that the Äerenkovphoton must have with respect to the WLS fiber in order to penetrate the cladding of the latter, is defined by the following relation:
where
and
are the refractive indexes of, respectively, the lead glass, the cladding-glue systems and the core of the fiber. For the case of
and a typical single clad fiber,
ranges between 45.0° and 49.2° for a photon wavelength in the
range. This will limit the acceptance of Äerenkov photons emitted by charged particles with
. The net effect is an increase of
and, consequently, of
(cfr. Eq.
6) corresponding to an improvement of
compensation power (cfr.
Section 2.3). The effect described above becomes more significant when double-clad fibers are employed.
The scintillating section. Several construction methodologies are being investigated to embed the scintillating fibers in the glass and will be discussed in a future article. The studies reported here assume that a matrix of 100 thin stainless-steel capillary tubes is embedded in the lead-glass. All tubes run parallel to one another along the module axis, arranged in a square transverse pattern with a spacing of 4 mm from center to center. A plastic scintillating fiber is inserted into each tube. The fibers are bundled together and read-out by a photodetector from both sides. The pitch between nearby fibers is sufficiently narrow compared to the detector’s nuclear hadronic interaction length, so the shower sampling fluctuations are kept small. The CoG of the shower can be determined with light division methods applied to the front and rear scintillating signals. These methods, successfully adopted in existing experiments [
30,
31], allow for the correction of eventual shower leakage on an event-by-event basis. The performance of this method is discussed in
Section 6
The scintillating-fiber-to-lead glass volume ratio for the proposed layout was approximately 0.05:1. This represents a reasonable compromise between good energy resolution of the detector (requiring as many fibers as possible) and easy of construction. The ratio
for the proposed layout is less than 8%, well within our goals, as discussed in
Section 4. The hadronic interaction length of the cell, calculated with a GEANT4 simulation, is about 24cm. Therefore, a
long calorimeter would corresponds to about
. Scintillating fibers and Äerenkovfibers of each cell are grouped in separate bunches and are readout by individual photodetectors. Therefore, a cell with a footprint of
represents the smallest sensitive region regarding detector granularity.
A sketch of the base cell is shown in 6. The granularity of the calorimeter could be further improved by grouping the fibers in smaller bundles and increasing the number of photodetectors accordingly. Larger modules can be assembled by mounting several cells in a mechanical support structure.
As already noted, one key feature of calorimeter is that it is integrally active, but, on the other hand, the scintillation and Äerenkov signal are produced in physically separated media, avoiding any contamination among them. The individual cells are not segmented longitudinally; therefore, the performance of the calorimeter is not degraded by inactive material residing between segments. Although the calorimeter is non-homogeneous, it has a uniform detector/absorber structure throughout the entire volume; hence, we expect no degradation in the energy resolution, most often observed when combining two different devices with different media.
The baseline layout and the choice of active materials, as described above, will be further justified in the remainder of this article. These decisions are not arbitrary, but the result of an ongoing and intense R&D program [
32,
33,
34] by the T1015 Collaboration.
Detection of electromagnetic showers. In principle, the
calorimeter can detect electromagnetic particles in dual-readout mode (namely, by measuring scintillation and the Äerenkovand combining them into Eq.
4). However, as already observed for the passive dual-readout case, the energy resolution would be sub-optimal compared to a dedicated
EM calorimeter.
On the other hand, because of the small volume ratio of scintillating fibers to lead glass, the
EM showers develop primarily in the active absorber, where the lead glass offers excellent electron and photon energy resolution. A more effective way to detect
EM showers is to operate the device as a traditional calorimeter, using only the information provided by the lead glass radiator. That would require an identification of the incoming particle to disentangle EM from hadronic showers. Therefore, we implemented in
such a technique based on two observables: a) the ratio between the total Äerenkov and scintillating lights produced and b) the amount of Äerenkov light generated in the foremost 20 cm of lead glass. The latter is justified by the fact that, for
,
, therefore an
EM shower would deposit most of its energy in the front section of the apparatus (as opposite to the case of hadronic showers which extend much further longitudinally). In order to estimate such initial energy deposit, we added, along the cell, special WLS fibers (from here on referred to as
), which are black painted for the entire length except for the foremost 20 cm, to obtain information on the fraction of the shower developing near the entrance of the calorimeter. This technique, already considered in the previous experiments [
35], will be thoroughly discussed in
Section 7.5.