What does a Calorimeter measure?
Calorimeter to melt ice to water to measure the heat released from chemical reactions. An adiabatic calorimeter is a calorimeter used to examine a runaway reaction. Since the calorimeter runs in an adiabatic environment, any heat generated by the material sample under test causes the sample to increase in temperature, thus fueling the reaction. No adiabatic calorimeter is fully adiabatic - some heat will be lost by the sample to the sample holder. A mathematical correction factor, known as the phi-factor, can be used to adjust the calorimetric result to account for these heat losses. The phi-factor is the ratio of
Calorimeter (particle physics) shower as it develops. Calorimetry design is an active area of research in particle physics. An electromagnetic calorimeter is one specifically designed to measure the energy of particles that interact primarily via the electromagnetic interaction, while a hadronic calorimeter is one designed to measure particles that interact via the strong nuclear force. (See types of particle showers for the differences between the two.) The response of a calorimeter can be described in terms of the e/h ratio. This is the measure of how well a calorimeter responds to leptons or photons versus hadrons. Ideally one would want a ratio e/h~1,