Performance of a BGO calorimeter with photodiode readout and with photomultiplier readout at energies up to 10 GeV

Bismuth germanate (BGO) calorimeter arrays, consisting of up to 12 elements of 30 × 30 × 200 mm³ have been tested at the CERN PS with pions and electrons of up to 10 GeV/c momentum, and at SIN with pions, electrons and protons up to 450 MeV/c. Both photomultiplier (PM) and photodiode (PD) readouts were used. Accurate calibration in the 100 MeV energy range was achieved with stopping protons, stopping pions and minimum ionizing pions. With 212 MeV electrons and PM readout, a time resolution of the BGO signal of 640 ps fwhm has been measured. The energy resolution for electrons above 1 GeV (PD readout) was found to be roughly constant at σ/E ∼ 1%. This is consistent with a negligible intrinsic resolution for BGO at these energies, after taking into account shower leakage and PD noise. For electrons of 92 and 200 MeV, we obtained (PM readout) energy resolutions close to the theoretical limit given by photon statistics and shower leakage. The electron/hadron separation was better than 1:500 over the energy range of 0.5 to 10 GeV, and improved to better than 1:1000 after a simple pattern cut. The energy deposition of the e.m. showers, both laterally and longitudinally (rear leakage), was found to be in agreement at the 0.1% level with Monte Carlo calculations using the SLAC-EGS program.