On muon production and other leakage aspects of pion absorption in a lead/scintillating-fiber calorimeter

Abstract We report on an experimental study of longitudinal leakage phenomena in hadronic shower development. Pions in the energy range of 10–150 GeV were sent into a lead/scintillating-fiber calorimeter with a thickness of 9.6 nuclear interaction lengths. The average fraction of the energy leaking out at the back of this calorimeter ranges from 0.04% at 10 GeV to 0.4% at 150 GeV. This leakage has a very small effect on the hadronic energy resolution. We measured the probability of the creation of escaping muons in the shower development process. This probability ranges from 0.2% at 10 GeV to 2.1% at 150 GeV. Assuming that these muons are produced from π- or K-decay, we find an exponentially decaying muon spectrum with a typical momentum of 2.8 GeV/ c , at 80 GeV incident energy. Also the rates at which hadrons and soft neutrons escape from the calorimeter are measured. Within the acceptance of the leakage calorimeter, neutrons are observed about 10 times as often as muons. Escaping hadrons dominate muons for shower energies above 20 GeV. The experiments were performed at CERN in the framework of the LAA project.