Performance of the Large Scale Prototypes of the CALICE Tile Hadron Calorimeter

The concept of a tile hadron calorimeter (HCAL) for the International Linear Collider (ILC) has been developed. A major aspect is the improvement of the jet energy resolution by measuring details of the shower development and combining them with the data of the tracking chamber (particle flow). The concept utilizes scintillating tiles that are read out by novel Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) and takes into account all design aspects that are demanded by the intended operation at the ILC. The proposed concept has been validated by three prototype configurations. The first one, a 72 x 72 cm(2)-large setup with 576 detector channels, has been tested with a hadronic beam at the CERN SPS test facility. The front-end electronics has proven to work as specified for ILC with self-trigger and zero-suppression by defining a single trigger-threshold around 0.5MIP per front-end ASIC. In a second 5-layer configuration with 720 detector channels with a novel data acquisition, the fully synchronous operation of all layers has been established successfully. The third prototype configuration with a size of 36x216cm has shown excellent signal integrity of the clock-and control signals over the final design length of 216cm. Results for the detector's performance with and without power-switched front-end electronics will be shown.