Performance of the SLD Warm Iron Calorimeter Prototype

A prototype hadron calorimeter, of similar design to the Warm Iron Calorimeter (WIC) planned for the SLD experiment, has been built and its performance has been studied in a test beam. The WIC is an iron sampling calorimeter whose active elements are plastic streamer tubes similar to those used for the Mont-Blanc proton decay experiment. The construction and operation of the tubes will be briefly described together with their use in an iron calorimeter - muon tracker. Efficiency, resolution and linearity have been measured in a hadron/muon beam up to 11 GeV. The measured values correspond to the SLD design goals.