Performance of the HPC calorimeter in DELPHI

The performance of the High-density Projection Chamber (HPC), the barrel electromagnetic calorimeterof the DELPHI experiment, is described. The detector adopts the time projection technique in order to obtain exceptionally fine spatial granularity in the three coordinates (/spl sim/2/spl times/20 mrad/sup 2/ in /spl theta//spl times//spl phi/ with nine samplings along the shower axes), using a limited number of readout channels (18432). Among the various topics concerning the HPC construction and operation, major emphasis is given to the aspects related to the calibration in energy of the calorimeter, based mainly on the analysis of the detector response to /sup 83m/Kr decays, and to the treatment of ageing in the readout proportional counters. >