A Large-Scale Pad-Sensor Based Prototype of the Silicon Tungsten Electromagnetic Calorimeter for the Forward Direction in ALICE at LHC

We constructed a large-scale electromagnetic calorimeter prototype as a part of the Forward Calorimeter upgrade project (FoCal) for the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The prototype, also known as “Mini FoCal”, consists of 20 layers of silicon pad sensors and tungsten alloy plates with printed circuit boards and readout electronics. The constructed detector was tested at the test beam facility of the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) at CERN. We obtain an energy resolution of about 4.3 250 GeV/c, which is consistent with realistic detector response simulations. Longitudinal profiles of electromagnetic shower were also measured and found to agree with the simulations. The same prototype detector was installed in the ALICE experimental area about 7.5m away from the interaction point. It was used to measure inclusive electromagnetic cluster energy distributions and neutral-pion candidate invariant mass distributions for pseudo-rapidity of η=3.7-4.5 in proton-proton collisions at √(s) = 13 TeV at LHC. The measured distributions in different η regions are similar to those obtained from PYTHIA simulations.