Calorimetry

Abstract

The aim of Particle Physics is to answer the two following questions: what are the fundamental constituents of matter? and what are the fundamental forces that control their behaviour at the most basic level? Experimentally this involves the study of hard particle interactions, determining the identity of the resulting particles and measuring their momenta with as high a precision as possible. Some thirty years ago a single detection device, the bubble chamber, was sufficient to reconstruct the full event information. At the current high centre of mass energies no single detector can accomplish this even though the number of particles whose identity and momenta need to be determined is limited [electrons, muons, photons, single charged hadrons, jets of hadrons, b-jets, taus and missing transverse energy E_t (v) ]. This leads to a familiar onion-like structure of present day high energy physics experiments.