Capabilities and Performance of the Baylor Hadron Calorimeter Test Stand

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the largest and most powerful particle collider in the world, capable of producing proton-proton collisions with a center of mass energy of 13.6 TeV. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector is one of four major collider experiments at the LHC, recording data from these collisions to test predictions of the Standard Model and to search for evidence of physics Beyond the Standard Model. One of the principal components of the CMS detector is the Hadron Calorimeter (HCAL), which measures the energy of hadronic particles produced in the collisions. With the goal of recording HCAL data of the highest quality, the High Energy Physics group at Baylor University has assembled a test stand with elements of the detectors, electronics, and data acquisition software that are identical to the HCAL system at CMS. This has provided opportunities for testing the behavior of the active HCAL system and proposed new components in the U.S. without interrupting CMS operations. In this presentation, we give an overview of the capabilities of Baylor's test stand and describe various measurements that have supported the operation and upgrades of the HCAL at CERN.