Hadron showers in a digital hadron calorimeter

A small prototype of a finely granulated digital hadron calorimeter with Resistive Plate Chambers as active elements was exposed to positive pions of 1-16 GeV energy from the Fermilab test beam. The event selection separates events with mostly non-interacting particles and events with hadronic showers which initiated in the front part of the calorimeter. The data are compared to a Monte Carlo simulation of the set-up. The paper concludes with predictions for the performance of an extended digital hadron calorimeter.