The talk will concentrate on aspects related to hadronic nuclear interactions, describing a few basic features and then trying to relate those features to quantities of particular interest for calorimetry. A general description of the physics of nuclear interactions and of the models used for their description will be given. A few concepts of interest for calorimetric measurements will be addressed in more detail, including the relevance of the Glauber cascade on high energy hadron-nucleus collisions, the importance of the formation zone concept and a some hints on modern intranuclear cascade approaches. Some examples of comparison of experimental data for particle production at different energies with state-of-the-art model predictions will be presented in order to validate the approach. A discussion of the impact of hadronic interactions on quantities of interest for calorimetry, will follow, both at the level of single interactions and of full showers in thick targets. In particular the fraction of energy going into the electromagnetic sector and that spent for binding energy losses will be discussed as a function of energy and projectiles. The impact of possible signal reductions of the heavily ionizing components of the hadronic showers, as well as of the contributions coming from low energy neutron scatterings and captures will be also addressed. Finally, some predictions of calorimetric performances will be shown for the case of the ICARUS fully sensitive liquid argon detector as an example of a calorimeter limited only by the intrinsic fluctuations of hadronic shower, as well as for the ATLAS combined calorimeter test beam where experimental data are available.
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