Measurements of the response of a hadronic calorimeter to beams of pions and protons of 1–10 GeV/c momenta

Abstract An ionization calorimeter was studied with a test beam at the Brookhaven Alternating Gradient Synchrotron. The purpose of the experiment was to calibrate the response of a similar but larger cross section calorimeter used to study high energy cosmic ray showers at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. The beam momenta were between 1 and 10 GeV/ c . Results of measurements of (1) the mean pulse height from a scintillator at different depths in the calorimeter, (2) the frequency of occurrence of very rare events with pulse heights many times the mean pulse height and (3) the correlation of pulse heights from several scintillators at different depths are presented and discussed.