Shower development of particles with momenta below 10 GeV in a highly granular scintillator–tungsten hadron calorimeter

A hadron sampling calorimeter with tungsten absorber is proposed for experiments at a future multi-TeV e + e − collider, such as the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC). Tungsten is a dense material, which has the advantage of providing sufficient depth for containing high energy hadrons, while limiting the diameter of the HCAL and of the surrounding solenoid. To test such a detector in real conditions, a large fine grained hadron calorimeter prototype with tungsten absorber plates and scintillator tiles read out by silicon photomultipliers was built and exposed to particle beams at CERN. Preliminary results obtained with the low momentum ( p ≤ 10 GeV ) electron, pion and proton data are presented. The analysis includes energy resolution measurements and studies of shower shapes. The results are compared with geant4 simulation models.