Nathan ( William Fremd H.S.)
Mentor: Carrado Gatto
Calorimetry is one of the most fundamental methods of particle detection and analysis still prevalently used in high energy physics. However, even in detectors as cutting edge as CMS, the calorimeters interfere with one another and do not give interaction-specific data. This summer, I worked alongside Corrado Gatto and two other members of the T1015 collaboration to design, construct and simulate an ADRIANO prototype. ADRIANO is a new proposition for the issues faced by a segmented calorimeter. A typical hadronic calorimeter can only have a sigma proportional to 50-100%, but by using the ADRIANO dual-readout technique that error percentage can be brought down to 25-35%. This is done using layers of lead glass dense enough to initiate showers and refractive enough to disentangle EM particles by taking advantage of the property of Cerenkov light with layers of plastic scintillator that give a reading for charged particle interactions and can be calibrated to disentangle EM, hadronic, and even neutral particles. The beauty of using lead glass to initiate a particle shower is that it eliminates the need for a layer of dense metal, which both cannot provide data and absorbs some of the energy. Through many steps of simulation primarily facilitating SLAC's SLIC program, I was able to show the degree to which our ADRIANO prototype absorbed energy and the promise dual-readout calorimetry holds for future particle detectors.