Towards A Compensatable Muon Collider Calorimeter with Manageable Backgrounds

Muon Collider detectors pose very challenging problems in detector technology due to extremely large backgrounds present in the detector volume as a result of muon decays. Current designs of a 750 GeV/c per beam Muon Collider envisage 4.28 × 105muon decays per meter in the beam pipe close to the interaction region. The decay electrons after intense shielding still manage to produce large backgrounds in the detector volume of low energy photons, neutrons and higher energy Bethe Heitler muons. There are 170/184/6.8/177 TeVs energy entering the detector volume per crossing due to EM particles/Muons/Mesons/Baryons respectively. We investigate the capabilities of an iron calorimeter with pixelated readout where each pixel gives a yes/no answer as to whether a charged particle passed through it or not, to solve this problem. Each pixel is individually triggered by a ``travelling gate trigger'' with a gate of 2 ns where the beginning of the gate is the time of arrival of a light signal from the interaction region to the pixel. We show that such a calorimeter is compensatable and propose two schemes to compensate the digital output in software to improve the resolution of the calorimeter. We show that such a calorimeter is capable of digitizing physics signals from the interaction region and as a result, the backgrounds from the muon decays are much reduced and under control.