Studies of detector cells for a hadronic calorimeter based on plastic scintillators

In this paper, we study variations of a plastic scintillator tile coupled to silicon photomultiplier via a dome-shaped cavity originally developed in the CALICE collaboration. Four kinds of plastic scintillator detector cells with different sizes based on the structure were studied for applications in analog readout highly granular hadronic calorimeter (AHCAL) in future circular electron positron collider (CEPC) project. The responses to cosmic rays of the detector cells could reach 33.89 p.e./MIPs (minimum ionizing particles). The good results of both response uniformity and MIP detection efficiency (above 95%) show that the detector cells with larger sizes (\(40\times 40\times 3\) and \(50\times 50\times 3\,\hbox {mm}^{3}\)) could provide an option for AHCAL detector cells of CEPC detectors.