Hadronic shower properties in highly granular calorimeters with different absorbers

The CALICE collaboration develops and tests highly granular calorimeter prototypes for future collider experiments. The scintillator-SiPM-based prototypes of hadron calorimeters with steel and tungsten absorbers were exposed to test beams from the CERN SPS in 2007-2011. The paper presents a comparison of hadronic shower properties observed in the test beam data. The application of software compensation technique is discussed for the energy reconstruction in calorimeters with different level of compensation. It was observed from the experimental data that the achieved improvement of relative energy resolution is about 20% for the noncompensating calorimeter, while it is less than 5% for the compensating one.