Calibration of the CALICE analog hadronic calorimeter (AHCAL)

The CALICE AHCAL technological prototype is a hadronic calorimeter prototype for a future e⁺e^- - collider (ILC and CLIC). It is designed as a sampling calorimeter alternating tungsten or steel absorber plates and active readout layers, segmented in single plastic scintillator tiles of 3 x 3 x 0.3 cm³ volume. Each tile is individually coupled to a silicon photomultiplier, read out by a dedicated ASIC with energy measurement and time stamping capability. The high granularity is meant to enable imaging and separation of single showers, for a Particle Flow approach to the jet energy measurement. The prototype aims to establish this technology as a scalable solution for an ILC detector. The first 14 layers of this prototype have been assembled and commissioned. The first 10 layers in the stack are used as tracker to determine the position of the first hard interaction of a pion shower in the first interaction length (λ) of the calorimeter. Four full size layers (72 x 72 cm²) are distributed between 1 and 3λ depth in the steel absorber. Data has been collected with muon, electron and pion beams at the CERN PS (2014). The first results on energy calibration with muons are presented, together with a comparison to the bench calibration obtained during tile production.