Design considerations for a scintillating plate calorimeter

Abstract

Results of the simulation studies for the design of a scintillating plate calorimeter for an SSC detector are presented. These simulation studies have been carried out with the CALOR89 code. The results show that both lead and uranium can yield good compensation in practical sampling geometries. However, the significant delayed energy release in the uranium systems can lead to a serious pile up problem at high rates. In the energy range under consideration, an iron-scintillator system is not compensating at any absorber to scintillator ratio. An inhomogeneous calorimeter with 4γ of lead-scintillator in a compensating configuration followed by 4γ of iron-scintillator with moderate sampling is found to perform as well as a homogeneous lead-scintillator compensating calorimeter. In such inhomogeneous systems the hadronic signal from different segments are weighted by a scheme based on minimum ionizing d E/d X. We show that, in a properly optimised three segment, compensation and good hadronic resolution can be achieved by appropriately weighting the signal from the segments.