The CMS high granularity calorimeter for the high luminosity LHC

The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment at CERN will undergo significant improvements during the Phase-II Upgrade to cope with a 10-fold increase in integrated luminosity with the HL-LHC (High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider) era. The forward calorimetry faces very high radiation levels and pileup in the detectors. The CMS collaboration is designing a highly granular calorimeter to replace the existing endcap calorimeters (CE). It features unprecedented transverse and longitudinal segmentation for both electromagnetic (CE-E) and hadronic (CE-H) parts. This will facilitate Particle Flow Algorithms (PFAs), where the structure of showers can be measured and used to enhance pileup rejection and particle identification, whilst still achieving good energy resolution. The CE-E and a large fraction of CE-H will use hexagonal silicon sensors produced from 200 mm (8 inch) wafers, with 192 (432) cells of 1 cm$^2$ (0.5 cm$^2$) size. The rest of the CE-H uses highly-segmented scintillator tiles with on-tile SiPM (Silicon Photomultiplier) readout. An overview of the HGCal (High Granularity Calorimeter) project is presented in this paper with a focus on the silicon sensors. We cover motivation, engineering design, expected performance and the current status of prototypes.