Hadronic models validation in GEANT4 with CALICE highly granular calorimeters

Abstract

The CALICE collaboration has constructed highly granular hadronic and electromagnetic calorimeter prototypes to evaluate technologies for the use in detector systems at a future Linear Collider, and to validate hadronic shower models with unprecedented spatial segmentation. The electromagnetic calorimeter is a sampling structure of tungsten and silicon with 9720 readout channels. The hadron calorimeter uses 7608 small plastic scintillator cells individually read out with silicon photomultipliers. This high granularity opens up the possibility for precise three-dimensional shower reconstructions and for software compensation techniques to improve the energy resolution of the detector. We discuss the latest results on the studies of shower shapes and shower properties and the comparison to the latest developed GEANT4 models for hadronic showers. A satisfactory agreement at better than 5% is found between data and simulations for most of the investigated variables. We show that applying software compensation methods based on reconstructed clusters the energy resolution for hadrons improves by a factor of 15%. The next challenge for CALICE calorimeters will be to validate the 4th dimension of hadronic showers, namely their time evolution.