Speaker
Description
The HIKE experiment was intended to continue the successful tradition of kaon experiments at CERN, building on the achievements of NA62 and exploiting the availability of a high-intensity beam together with an advanced detector design. In particular, the new shashlik electromagnetic calorimeter (MEC) was designed to reach a time resolution of approximately $100\,\text{ps}$, while maintaining an energy resolution comparable to that of the NA62 electromagnetic calorimeter. Although HIKE was not approved as an experiment, the MEC project represented an important test bench for the development of high-performance sampling electromagnetic calorimeters, with technologies of direct interest for future projects such as the second phase of the LHCb electromagnetic calorimeter Upgrade 2, to be installed during Long Shutdown 4 and operated in the HL-LHC era.
This presentation will outline the current status of the MEC design, including results from detailed calorimeter simulations carried out with the Geant4 toolkit in synergy with the investigation of readout options. It will also present the status of the analysis of a test beam data collected at the CERN PS T9 facility in September 2024 and discuss plans for a new test beam scheduled for the first week of September 2025 on the same beamline, where a prototype with double-side readout will be tested to improve the time resolution.
