FCAL is a worldwide detector Research&Development collaboration. About 40 physicists join their effort to develop the technologies of special calorimeters in the very forward region of future detectors at an e+e- collider. These calorimeters must be compact, precisely positioned, and read out very fast. Since the radiation load in the very forward region is large, sensors of unprecedented radiation hardness are needed.
The FCAL collaboration and its organizational structure are described in a Memorandum of Cooperation MoC., signed by 8 institutes.
The instrumentation of the very forward region comprises three subdetectors, as shown in the picture below. At small polar angles, adjacent to the beam pipe, the Pair Monitor and BeamCal measure remnants of beamstrahlung to assist beam tuning. BeamCal, in addition, will measure high-energy single electrons. LumiCal, at larger polar angles, will be the luminometer of the experiment using Bhabha scattering as the gauge process.
The research of FCAL is focused on:
* optimization of the design of the very forward region using Monte Carlo simulations
* radiation hard solid state sensors
* fast front-end and ADC ASICs
* performance tests of prototype detectors in the beam
FCAL collaborates with the Detector Concepts ILD and SiD of the International Linear Collider and works together with CLICdp, the CLIC detector and physics collaboration.
FCAL is supported by national funding agencies and the FP7 and H2020 programs of the European Community.
