Speaker
Summary
Present calorimetric systems give a global information on the total energy deposit at
a given time in large detector cells but provide no details on the cascade mechanism
of this energy deposition in space and time, as well as on the physics of the signal
generation.
In the domain of High Energy Physics (HEP) high-precision measurement of hadrons
and
jets is one of the detector challenges at future high energy colliders. It has been
shown that higher segmentation of the calorimter and/or the simultaneous recording
of
the scintillation light produced in an active medium, which is proportional to the
total energy deposited by the shower particles, and the Cherenkov light, which is
only produced by the charged, relativistic shower particles, can significantly
improve the performance of present hadron calorimeters.
At low energy, for instance for medical imaging devices, the detailed recording of
the whole Compton-photoelectric interaction chain would have a strong impact on the
spatial resolution, energy resolution and sensitivity of the imaging cameras.
Recent progress in heavy scintillating crystal production methods as well as in
nanotechnologies applied to photonic crystals and to quantum dots (nanocrystals)
introduce interesting perspectives for he development of innovative strategies for an
homogeneous but finely structured calorimeter. We will describe in this talk how a
new class of metamaterials based on these technologies can open the way to new
calorimeter concepts allowing to simultaneously record with high precision the
maximum of information on the shower such as its direction, the spatial distribution
of the energy deposition and its composition in terms of electromagnetic, charged and
neutral hadron contents.
