Development of a novel highly granular hadronic calorimeter with scintillating glass tiles

Future electron-positron colliders, or Higgs factories, impose stringent requirements on the energy resolutions of hadrons and jets for the precision physic programs of the Higgs, Z, W bosons and the top quark. To address the challenges, one of the state-of-art calorimetry options is based on the particle flow algorithms (PFA) and requires fine longitudinal and transverse segmentations to achieve excellent separation capability to distinguish near-by particle showers. Among highly granular calorimetry options, a novel hadronic calorimetry (HCAL) with scintillating glass tiles is emerging.The scintillating glass HCAL design focuses on the significant improvement of hadronic energy resolution, especially in the low energy region (typically below 10 GeV for major jet components at Higgs factories), with a notable increase of the energy sampling fraction by using high-density scintillating glass tiles. Simulation studies have been done to quantify the hadronic energy resolution with single hadrons and physics potentials with jets using the ArborPFA. Developments of new scintillating glass materials are ongoing within a collaboration of research institutions and companies in China. Small-scale samples of scintillating glass have been characterised using dedicated experimental setups to extract key properties (e.g. intrinsic light yield, emission and transmission spectra, scintillation decay times, etc.) required by the HCAL design. An optical simulation model of a single scintillating glass tile has been established to provide guidance for the development of scintillating glass. In this contribution, highlights of the expected detector performance and latest scintillating glass developments will be presented.