ATLAS Calorimetry Hadronic Calibration Studies

Abstract: The ATLAS experiment -- situated at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva -- is on schedule to take its first collision data in 2009. Physics topics include finding the Higgs boson, heavy quark physics, and looking for extensions of the standard model such as supersymmetry. Upon acceptance of an event by the level 1 trigger, data is read out from the liquid argon calorimeters using multi-mode optical fibers. In total, 58 cables were installed, corresponding to 232 12-fiber ribbons or 2784 individual fibers. The cables, about one hundred meters in length, were installed between the main ATLAS cavern and the counting room in the USA15 cavern. Patch cables were spliced onto the ribbons and the fiber attenuation was measured. For 1296 fiber pairs in 54 cables, the average attenuation was 0.69 dB. Only five fibers were found to have losses exceeding 4 dB, resulting in a failure rate of less than 2 per mil. In the ATLAS liquid argon barrel presampler, short circuits consisting of small pieces of dust, metal, etc. can be burned away in situ by discharging a capacitor over the high voltage lines. In a burning campaign in November 2006, seventeen existing short circuits were successfully removed. An investigation on how to implement saturation effects in liquid argon due to high ionization densities resulted into the implementation of the effect in the ATLAS Monte Carlo code, improving agreement with beam test data. The timing structure of hadronic showers was investigated using a Geant4 Monte Carlo. The expected behavior as described in the literature was reproduced, with the exception that some sets of physics models gave unphysical gamma energies from nuclear neutron capture. An ATLAS Combined Beam Test was conducted in the summer/fall of 2004 in the CERN H8 area, containing a whole slice of the ATLAS detectors in the central barrel region. The controlled single-particle environment allows the validation of Monte Carlo code and calibration. A method for calibrating the response of a segmented calorimeter to hadrons was developed. The ansatz is that information on longitudinal shower fluctuations gained from a principal component analysis of the layer energy depositions can improve energy resolution by correcting for hadronic invisible energy and dead material losses: projections along the eigenvectors of the correlation matrix are used as input for the calibration. The technique was used to reconstruct the energy of pions impinging on the ATLAS calorimeters during the 2004 Combined Beam Test. Simulated Monte Carlo events were used to derive corrections for invisible energy lost in nuclear reactions and in dead material in front and in between the calorimeters.  For pion beams with energies between 20 and 180 GeV, the particle energy was reconstructed within 3% and the resolution was improved by about 20%. As a comparison, a simple iterative scheme with a single e/? factor and dead material corrections was devised, giving similar performance.