sPHENIX Calorimeter Calibrations and Progress Towards Au+Au Eta Meson Measurements

sPHENIX, the latest particle detector experiment at RHIC, has begun commissioning with 200 GeV Au+Au collision data in 2023, and is recording p+p collision data in 2024. In addition to various tracking systems, sPHENIX is equipped with three concentric sampling calorimeters, one electromagnetic and two hadronic. Each calorimeter subsystem requires a precise relative calibration which initiated the development of a data-driven technique, the tower-slope method. Tower-slope calibrates any tower’s energy spectrum by fitting it to a reference spectrum such as the same tower at a later time, or a ϕ-integrated spectrum in the same bin of η to flatten location-dependent non-uniformities. In this talk the tower-slope method is outlined with its application to Au+Au and p+p data of sPHENIX. Furthermore, the progress towards a measurement of η→γγ yields in Au+Au data of selected p_T bins will be presented.