Performance Characteristics Study for the sPHENIX Inner Hadronic Calorimeter Scintillating Tiles

The Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) is a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons that existed a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. To better understand the properties of the QGP, sPHENIX, a new experiment at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) will perform high precision measurements of jets in nuclear collisions. Critical to this goal is the hadronic calorimetry (HCal) subsystem, which consists of an outer and inner segment. The Inner HCal is composed of plastic scintillating tiles sandwiched between aluminum absorber plates. The Inner HCal tile testing at Georgia State University allows tiles to be sorted and aggregated into sets of five, known as towers. The tiles within a tower will have a similar light yield to optimize the calorimeter's performance. To achieve this, each tile's performance is evaluated by measuring the tile's response to cosmic rays. The distribution of tile performance helps us track the performance characteristics and calibrate the Inner HCal tiles. This poster will present the current status of the Inner HCal tile testing and assembly.