Investigation of the local hardening effect produced by various low-Z materials in a Si/(Fe, Pb) electromagnetic calorimeter

The condition for obtaining a calorimetric response linear with energy for hadronic showers and an energy resolution that improves as the incident energy increases is the equalization of the electromagnetic (e) and the hadronic (π) signal responses. This equalization is obtained by exploiting a local hardening effect realized through the insertion of low-Z thin plates between the low-Z absorbers and the active material in a hadronic calorimeter with silicon readout. This effect, which allows the reduction of the calorimeter response to the electromagnetic component of the incoming hadronic showers, has been investigated for different low-Z materials. The relevance of some aspects of this study to the radiation hardness of the calorimeters is also addressed.