Operation and Calibration of a Highly Granular Hadron Calorimeter with SiPM-on-Tile Read-out

The Analogue Hadron Calorimeter (AHCAL) is being developed within the CALICE collaboration for experiments at a future lepton collider. It is a sampling calorimeter with alternating layers of steel absorber plates and plastic scintillator tiles as active material. In the SiPM on tile design, the tiles are directly coupled to silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs). The front-end electronics are integrated into the active layers of the calorimeter. They are designed for low power consumption by rapidly power cycling according to the beam structure of a linear accelerator. In 2017 and 2018, a new large prototype with 38 active layers of 72x72 cm2 size has been built. Each active layer consists of four readout boards with four 36 channel SPIROC2E readout ASIC each, resulting in 576 channels per layer. The prototype has been designed for mass production and assembly techniques: It uses injection-moulded tiles which were wrapped semi-automatically in reflector foil, tiles and electronics components were assembled using pick-and-place machines and all detector parts were tested during assembly. The prototype with ~22,000 channels was commissioned at DESY and took muon, electron and pion data at the CERN SPS to demonstrate the capabilities of a SiPM-on-tile calorimeter concept with scalable detector design and the reliable operation of a large prototype. This proceedings gives an overview of the calibration results of the large CALICE AHCAL technological prototype.