SILICON SAMPLING HADRONIC CALORIMETRY - A TOOL FOR EXPERIMENTS AT THE NEXT GENERATION OF COLLIDERS

The SICAPO Collaboration project to build a perfectly compensating hadron calorimeter using silicon as the active medium, is described. The insertion of low-Z material (G10 plates) in front or at the rear of the silicon detectors allows fine tuning of the calorimeter response to electromagnetic showers. This is a new approach to obtaining compensation. The tuning can be exploited to obtain e/pi =1 (compensation condition) . The expected performance ranks this calorimeter among the best candidates to face the severe constraints requested by the next generation of colliders.