Shashlik - Definition and Overview

1. A form of Shish kebab (marinated meat grilled on a skewer) popular in former Soviet Union countries, notably in Russia. It often features alternating slices of meat and onions.

2. In high energy physics detectors, shashlik refers to a pile of alternating slices of absorber (e.g. lead) and scintillator materials (cristal or plastic) used in calorimetry (see also external link http://rkb.home.cern.ch/rkb/PH14pp/node19.html). The absorber has a small interaction length, so that a particle radiates energy in a short track. The scintillator material produces visible light when transversed by the particle's radiated energy (in case of a electromagnetic calorimeter, in the form of photons and/or electron+positron pairs). The energy of the particle may be then measured by the intensity of scintillation light produced by the various scintillator slices.

This type of calorimeter was most probably named after a culinary term by Russian and Ukrainian scientists who first proposed it. See http://www.intas.be/catalog/92-0024.htm