Test Beam Results and Status of the sPHENIX Calorimeter System

Abstract

sPHENIX is a planned upgrade to the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). It is designed for precise measurements of jets, heavy-flavor and upsilons in the quark gluon plasma which is created in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC. sPHENIX consists of tracking and calorimeter systems that cover the full 2 in azimuth and $^\pm 1$ in psuedo-rapidity. The calorimeter system is composed of an electromagnetic calorimeter and a hadronic calorimeter. The EMCal towers are made of fibers embedded in a tungsten and epoxy mixture. The HCal has alternating layers of steel plates and scintillator tiles. Fibers embedded in the scintillator tiles are read out by SiPMs as is the light collected in the EMCal towers. To test the performance of the calorimeter design, a prototype was built and tested as the T-1044 experiment at the Fermilab Test Beam Facility. Results from the 2016 test beam demonstrated that the midrapidity configuration performed as expected from simulation and satisfied the performance requirements for the sPHENIX program. In February 2017, the high rapidity configuration of the calorimeter prototypes were tested. This includes the 2dimensional projective EMCal towers. The preliminary results from the 2017 beam test and corresponding simulation studies are presented along with the plans for the 2018 beam test.