Performance of a Highly Granular Scintillator-SiPM Based Hadron Calorimeter Prototype in Strong Magnetic Fields

Within the CALICE collaboration, several concepts for the hadronic calorimeter of a future linear collider detector are studied. After having demonstrated the capabilities of the measurement methods in “ physics prototypes”, the focus now lies on improving their implementation in “ engineering prototypes”,that are scalable to the full linear collider detector. The Analog Hadron Calorimeter (AHCAL) concept is a sampling calorimeter of tungsten or steel absorber plates and plastic scintillator tiles read out by silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) as active material. The front-end chips are integrated into the active layers of the calorimeter and are designed for minimizing power consumption by rapidly cycling the power according to the beam structure of a linear accelerator. The versatile electronics allows the prototype to be equipped with different types of scintillator tiles and SiPMs. A prototype with $\sim$ 2200 channels, equipped with several types of scintillator tiles and SiPMs, was tested with muons and electrons in a 1.5 T magnet at the CERN SPS in May 2017 to establish the operational stability with power pulsing and the overall detector performance in a magnetic field.