Studies on dual readout calorimetry with meta-crystals

The meta-crystals concept is an approach that consists of using both undoped and properly doped heavy crystal fibers of identical material as the active medium of a calorimeter. The undoped fibers behave as Cherenkov radiators while the doped ones behave as scintillators. A dual readout calorimeter can be built with its sensitive volume composed of a mixture of both types of crystals. In addition if the calorimeter is adequately finely segmented it can also function as a particle flow calorimeter at the same time. In this way one could possibly combine the advantages of both the particle flow concept and the dual-readout scheme. We discuss the approach of dual readout calorimetry with meta-crystals made of Lutetium Aluminium Garnet (LuAG). We briefly present studies on the material development and first testbeam activities and then focus on performance expectation studies based on simulation. We discuss in more detail the results from generic systematic scannings of the design parameters of a dual readout calorimeter. The design parameters under study include transverse and longitudinal granularity, sampling frequency/readout fraction of the scintillation/ionisation and the Cherenkov signals, total length of calorimeter, mixture of homogeneous and sampling dual readout components, corresponding composition etc. We close with a brief outlook on open issues and further R&D needed to proceed from an ideal conceptual case to the design of a realistic detector.