The Performance of the New LHCf Detector for Hadronic Showers

Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider forward (LHCf) experiment is designed to understand the hadronic interaction between cosmic rays and the atmosphere. We have measured neutral particles, photons and neutrons, in very forward region of √ s = 13 TeV proton-proton collision at CERN-LHC. Before this operation, the LHCf detectors were updated in 2014 by replacing the plastic scintillators with GSO scintillators to improve radiation-hardness. In this paper, we present the performance of the one of the new LHCf detectors for hadronic showers evaluated by a beam test at CERN-SPS and MC simulations. The energy resolution and position resolution are found to be 42 % and 0.9 mm, respectively, at the center of the detector for a 350 GeV proton beam. We confirmed the new detector performance is consistent with the performance of the old detector used in the 2010 operation as expected.