Calibration of the absolute energy scale at high-energy photon (gamma-gamma, gamma-electron) colliders is discussed. The luminosity spectrum at photon colliders is broad and has a rather sharp high-energy edge, which can be used, for example, to meas
ure the mass of the Higgs boson in the process gamma-gamma to H or masses of charged scalars by observing the cross-section threshold. In addition to the precise knowledge of the edge energy of the luminosity spectrum, it is even more important to have a way to calibrate the absolute energy scale of the detector. At first sight, Compton scattering itself provides a unique way to determine the beam energies and produce particles of known energies that could be used for detector calibration. The energy scale is given by the electron mass m_e and laser photon energy omega_0. However, this does not work at realistic photon colliders due to large nonlinear effects in Compton scattering at the conversion region (xi^2 sim 0.3). It is argued that the process gamma-electron to eZ_0 provides the best way to calibrate the energy scale of the detector, where the energy scale is given by m_Z.
The discovery of the Higgs boson (and still nothing else) have triggered appearance of many proposals of Higgs factories for precision measurement of the Higgs properties. Among them there are several projects of photon colliders (PC) without e+e- in
addition to PLC based on e+e- linear colliders ILC and CLIC. In this paper, following a brief discussion of Higgs factories physics program I give an overview of photon colliders based on linear colliders ILC and CLIC, and of the recently proposed photon-collider Higgs factories with no e+e- collision option based on recirculation linacs in ring tunnels.
