Improving High-Energy Sensitivity of GLAST with Calorimeter-only Photons

The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) is being developed as a potential follow-on to the phenomenal success of the EGRET telescope on the Compton Observatory. One proposed design contains a silicon strip based tracker-converter and a separate hodoscopic scintillator calorimeter. Many high energy (> 10 GeV) photons will pass completely through the tracker without converting, interacting only in the calorimeter. Unlike EGRET, the hodoscopic calorimeter will be able to determine the direction of these calorimeter-only photons, although with poorer angular resolution than the tracker. In this presentation, we examine some of the potential scientific benefits of saving these calorimeter-only photon events and including them in the analysis.