Abstract: | We present a study of the response of the highly granular Digital Hadronic
Calorimeter with steel absorbers, the Fe-DHCAL, to positrons, muons, and pions
with momenta ranging from 2 to 60 GeV/c. Developed in the context of the CALICE
collaboration, this hadron calorimeter utilises Resistive Plate Chambers as
active media, interspersed with steel absorber plates. With a transverse
granularity of $1, imes,1,$cm$^{2}$ and a longitudinal segmentation of 38
layers, the calorimeter counted 350,208 readout channels, each read out with
single-bit resolution (digital readout). The data were recorded in the Fermilab
test beam in 2010-11. The analysis includes measurements of the calorimeter
response and the energy resolution to positrons and muons, as well as detailed
studies of various shower shape quantities. The results are compared to
simulations based on Geant4, which utilise different electromagnetic and
hadronic physics lists. |