Intercalibration of the longitudinal segments of a calorimeter system

Three different methods of setting the hadronic energy scale of a longitudinally segmented calorimeter system are compared with each other. The merits of these methods have been studied with testbeam data from the CDF Plug Upgrade Calorimeter. It turns out that one of the (commonly used) calibration methods introduces a number of undesirable side effects, such as an increased hadronic signal nonlinearity and trigger biases resulting from the fact that the reconstructed energy of hadrons depends on the starting point of their showers. These problems can be avoided when a different calibration method is used. The results of this study are applied to determine the e/h values of the calorimeter and its segments. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.