Low-energetic hadron interactions in a highly granular calorimeter

The CALICE collaboration develops imaging calorimeters for precision measurements at a future electron-positron linear collider. These calorimeters feature a fine granularity in both longitudinal and transverse direction, which is needed to fulfill the shower separation requirement of Particle Flow reconstruction algorithms. CALICE has constructed prototypes for several design options for electromagnetic and hadron calorimeters and has successfully operated these detectors during combined test-beam programs at DESY, CERN, and Fermilab since 2005. The focus of this dissertation is on the prototype for a hadron calorimeter with analog readout (AHCAL), which is a 1 m3 scintillator-steel sampling calorimeter with 38 sensitive layers and a depth of 5.3 nuclear interaction lengths. Each scintillator layer is pieced together from separate tiles with embedded silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) for measuring the scintillation light. With a total of 7608 readout channels, the AHCAL prototype represents the first large-scale application of SiPMs. This thesis covers the commissioning and operation of the AHCAL and other detectors for several months at the Fermilab Test-beam Facility in 2008 and 2009 and the analysis of electron and pion data collected during these measurements. The analysis covers energies from 1 GeV to 30 GeV and is the first analysis of AHCAL data at energies below 8 GeV. Because the purity of the recorded data is not sufficient for analysis, event selection procedures for electrons and pions at these energies and a method to estimate the purities of these data samples are developed. The calibration of detectors employing SiPMs requires parameters that change with operating voltage and temperature. The correction of these parameters for the effects of temperature variations during data collection and their portability to different operating conditions are evaluated using the AHCAL as an example. This is important for the use of this technology in a collider experiment where a re-calibration after installation is not feasible on short time scales. In addition, procedures to identify dead, noisy, and unstable cells in the AHCAL, which affect the detector performance especially at low particle energies, are introduced. The analysis of low-energetic electron data (1 GeV to 20 GeV) presented in this thesis aims at evaluating the AHCAL performance, checking the detector calibration, and validating the understanding of both the detector and the simulations in this energy range. Detailed comparisons between pion data at low energies (2 GeV to 30 GeV) and different models implemented in the Geant4 simulation toolkit are presented as well. This analysis allows for validating the simulations and studying the features of individual models and gives indications for possible refinements of the simulation of hadron cascades. The energy range covered by this analysis is particularly important because it includes the validity limits of several of the investigated models. The imaging capabilities of the AHCAL are exploited to extend the range of comparisons from the overall detector response to topological cascade features.