Speaker
Description
The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) is a next-generation collider designed to enable precision studies of the quark and gluon structure of nucleons and nuclei across a broad kinematic range. Achieving its physics goals requires electromagnetic calorimetry that accurately reconstructs electrons and photons while providing excellent pion discrimination. The Barrel Imaging Calorimeter (BIC) is being developed as the electromagnetic calorimeter for the barrel region of the ePIC detector to meet these requirements.
The BIC is a hybrid detector concept that combines a lead/scintillating-fiber (Pb/SciFi) sampling calorimeter with high-granularity silicon imaging layers. The imaging layers, based on the low-power AstroPix monolithic active pixel sensor, provide detailed spatial information on electromagnetic shower development, while the Pb/SciFi structure provides the primary energy measurement and shower reconstruction. Together, these complementary technologies enable precise energy and position reconstruction, strong electron–pion discrimination, and the separation of closely spaced electromagnetic showers, including those from neutral-pion decays. As the BIC program advances toward final design readiness, this presentation will provide an overview of the detector concept and its physics-driven requirements, highlight recent progress in detector development, and present results from test-article characterization and beam-test studies toward the realization of the full BIC detector.